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It's 2027, and Mother Russia is finally great again. The Soviet years and the messy capitalist confusion that followed are long over, the decadent junkie cyberpunks in the West have been shut out with a huge wall, the Czar is back in the Kremlin, the sacred Russian church is in charge of moral, and the not-so-secret secret police keep everyone in check. Finally, everyone can sit back and be Russian - that is work hard, pray, eat black bread, and try not to notice that the Chinese are making a fortune off them.

Like the title suggests, A Day In The Life Of An Oprichnik borrows the structure from Solzhenitsyn's Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, but instead of a political prisoner, this time we get to follow one of the jailers. (Well, supposedly.) Komyaga is one of the top enforcers in the secret police, and during one day he gets to see a lot of action; he roots out and hangs unwanted elements, he oversees the day's state-approved dissident poetry and makes sure it's not too subversive, he flies to Sibiria to consult with soothsayers and make deals with the Chinese, he does very expensive drugs, he philosophizes on the importance of Russianness... Especially the bits about the serfs and the czar and the church and blind obedience for the greater good. Praise the classics and make sure nobody reads them wrong or writes anything new that might upset the ruling order.

Each kiosk has to have two of each product so the people can choose. It's wise and profound. Our people - God's people - should choose between two products, not three and not thirty-three. When the people choose between two they feel calm, safe for tomorrow, they have no worries and are content. And with a people like that, a content people, great things can be achieved.

It's a gleefully vicious satire Sorokin serves up, both of nationalism and Orwellian controlled pseudo-democracy in general, but also of the Putinist conservative to-thyself-be-enough vision. It's deliberately over the top, ending in an outright pornographical gangbang of the supposedly powerful, but it's hard to miss the point: going forward by going backward and demanding that everyone respect the Good Old Ways will only lead to a snake eating its own tail, losing itself in a dream of what a country should be but never was.

And meanwhile the Chinese buy everyone.

Varje bra skräckhistoria sägs börja med “Vore det inte kul om…” Vore det inte kul om någon murade in sin rival i källaren, vore det inte kul om det där motellet drevs av en galning med moderskomplex, vore det inte kul om det bodde en tolvårig vampyr i Blackeberg? Där börjar de; problemet är om de slutar där också.

Anders Fager tycker om det första steget. I Samlade svenska kulter vandrar han omkring på Kungsholmen och i lite svenska småstäder och ser sig om, och överallt puttrar det hemska fram under den lagomsvenska vardagen. Ser ni ålderdomshemmet där? Där offrar man nog till Lovecraftska gudar! Ser ni dagiset där? Där offrar man nog till Lovecraftska gudar! Ser ni gymnasieflickorna där? De är säkert medlemmar av en uråldrig orgiekult som lockar ut kåta män i skogen för att… äh… offra dem till Lovecraftska gudar! Och så vidare och så vidare. Och det är egentligen ingen dum tanke. Det är inte miltals ifrån det som… ja, för att ta elefanten i rummet när det gäller svensk skräck, John Ajvide Lindqvist. Idén om att ta en osäkerhet, en fasa som redan finns i människors liv, och förstärka den med ett monster. Av och till passar Fager dessutom på att leka mer med historier och sagor som redan finns, nickar åt Astrid och Selma och det är ju egentligen ingen dum tanke. Här finns invandrade varulvar från Östeuropa som kämpar för att behålla en identitet de redan glömt, här finns småbarnsfamiljer inträngda i fruktansvärda ettor, här finns unga män som blir bokstavligen besatta av framgång och deras flickvänner som förvandlas till lyxhustrur à la Rapunzel.

Men så är det också det där med att göra något efter den där första “Vore det inte kul om”. Och det är där den här novellsamlingen alltmer får slut på idéer. Historia efter historia utgår från samma grundmall, utforskar liknande idéer med ganska platta karaktärer utan att hinna gå dem inpå döden, och när han långsamt bygger ihop många av dem till en löst sammanhållen stor berättelse blir följden mest att det verkar som om uppskattningsvis 43% av Stockholms befolkning är aktiva inom det ockulta av ingen särskild anledning. Språket han använder, med eviga upprepningar och. Korta. Meningar. Som. Mest av allt får varenda berättare här att låta likadan hjälper inte heller. Här finns historier som är lovande, och jag vill så gärna att det här ska vara bra, men som helhet blir det bara platt. Skräck är skräck för att det griper tag i något djupt inom oss; Samlade svenska kulter famlar vilt och försöker grabba tag i allt samtidigt, men lovikkavantarna är lite för tjocka för att han ska få grepp.

It's easy to count in integers, whole numbers - just look at those five stars we assign to the books we read here. Assign an exact numerical value to a 300-page book. There should be a mathematical formula, some simple way of explaining just how good a book is, whether it's cheap entertainment for the masses or a work of true Literature. But then there are those rare books that manage to be both, striking a balance between heart and brain, where both the author and her characters come across as intelligent, where by the end you've got so much to think about that you don't have to feel cheap if you get something in your eye.

The Housekeeper And The Professor really wants to be one of those books, with a plot that might have been turned into a vehicle for whoever is the Japanese Julia Roberts, yet so well-written and with so much going on between the lines that it feels meaningful. The plot itself is simple without being dumb; a young woman with no family or education takes up housekeeping to support herself and her young son, and the agency sends her to an old mathematics professor who's suffered a brain injury and lost his memory; he remembers everything up to 1975, but after that he just remembers the last 80 minutes. Every morning when she turns up, he's never seen her before. But somehow, between the three of them they start building a weird little family unit, centered around her son's math homework and the old man's fascination with baseball statistics; memory and friendship may be fleeting, but numbers are constant. I'm strongly reminded of the real story told in Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia, about the conductor who can only remember the last 90 seconds of his life yet is capable of performing music that goes on for far longer since it gives him a context.

There's potential here. A lot of it. Ogawa is an excellent stylist, who manages to create complex characters without giving away too much, painting in very thin lines - despite all the mathematical themes she weaves in, and the personal and societal issues they hint at without making them too obvious, it's a very unbusy novel. It's refreshing, and I want to like it. And yet at some point I want to go "Oh come ON." It becomes a Sophie's World for adults, where Ogawa tries just too hard to show that she's done her homework, and tries to turn Fermat's last theorem and Euler's identity into some sort of mystical pieces of eternal wisdom showing that three irrational numbers can make 1. It's not that it's a bad idea, it's just way too overdone, and somewhere around the seventh time the professor explains how a certain number can explain the perfect world order that the everlasting blah-de-blah-de-blah I start wondering how I can possibly like this and loathe Paulo Coelho at the same time.

OK, that's unfair. Ogawa is far too good a writer (if maybe not author) to earn that comparison. A lot of people will love this book, and it's hard to tell them not to. It's going to make them laugh, cry, and think a bit. If I see it on a bestseller stand I won't be surprised. I'm just not sure how much of it I'll want to remember.

The beginning is like something straight out of Scarface; the pock-marked gangster and the beautiful woman he's always wanted are sitting at the bar when a rival enters, yells something about revenge for something that happened 20 years ago, and opens fire. Bullets whizz, people dive for cover, the gangster and his girlfriend are riddled with – no wait, he's the only one who gets shot, killing women isn't honourable. No wait, he's shot, but only wounded. And besides, it was his cousin who did the shooting. And besides, the man he killed 20 years ago was ihs best friend, and the two families' men have been killing each other one by one since. For honour. No, because a ghost told them to. No, for power over the cocaine trade. No, for love. No, because violence breeds violence. And besides, I could see in his eyes that – how did you see his eyes? He always wears sunglasses. I saw him return fire. No, he was unarmed, he was there for love. His men returned fire. He was there alone.

In the end, its all just rumours. What we know for sure: in one of the larger cities in Colombia, the two families Monsalve and Barragan have been at war for decades. One by one they've killed each other off, always on one of the multiplying anniversaries of some previous death, and now they're down to a few last men on both sides; the warrior, the thinker, the poet, the assassin, living in luxury behind locked doors and tinted windshields since they might die tomorrow. And of course their women, wives, girlfriends, sisters, whores. And then all the other people in town, who narrate the whole thing and occasionally start bickering, debating, speculating, inventing to account for the bits they're not actually present for. How did they get here, who said what, who did what, who loves whom, who killed whom, what were his last words, where's it going to end when they make one last attempt to survive this circle of death?

Leopard In The Sun is a deliciously double-bottomed story. It can easily be read as a pure drama, a South American West Side Story with gangsters, a classic showdown between brothers forced by circumstances to be enemies. As such, it works very nicely, if a little predictably; it depends a lot on its characters, where the women are somehow at the heart of it all even though (perhaps exactly because) the story doesn't shy away from it being a brutal macho society. OK, so at times, it's a question of how flowery you like your prose, but even that works into it somehow.

Because somewhere in the corner of the story, we're constantly reminded that a lot of that typical South American magic realism, all the sun and the dark-eyed women with heaving bosoms and the honourable bandits and the mystical old Indians that pop up a couple of times is a cliché and that the narrators aren't an objective camera. As a kick up the backside of literature it's not quite Bolaño, but there's still a point: all of it, the way everyone trips all over themselves to explain what's going on based on their own ideas of what should be going on is just wishful thinking that falls apart as the story progresses. After all, who wants to live in a society controlled by completely ruthless criminals, naked power, greed and violence? Isn't it easier to see the criminals as tragic, romantic, Shakespeare-Márquezian characters? So that's the story that gets told, as the bodies pile. And if the leopard's spots start fading, we know what they're supposed to look like and we can always fill them in.