A spectre is haunting England in the surreal tales assembled in Ben Pester’s Sail Away Land, the follow-up to his debut collection Am I in the Right Place? (2020) and last year’s novel The Expansion Project: the spectre of tweeness.

Confronted with scenarios involving nightmarish gatherings, paranormal entities and psychic electronic devices, his characters respond with a lobotomised, quaint strain of stoicism – the type that makes us say things like ‘It’ll come out in the wash’ when getting made redundant, and ‘Least said…’ when handed a terminal diagnosis.

‘You have left the grill on!’ repeatedly frets the title story’s nameless protagonist, like a Tony Hancock character, oblivious to the fact he is also apparently shrinking to the size of a rat. Narrated by his television, who reads his mind as he attempts to blot out a break-up and work troubles by watching a dour crime drama, the protagonist’s story overlaps with the TV programme. ‘Is any of this real?’ he wonders. In the end, his anxiety about his grill setting fire turns out to be well-founded. But what about the shrinking? At the heart of the story lie the myriad ways we conceal the horrors of everyday life with equally noxious fictions.

Other stories temper tweeness with even greater absurdity. In ‘You and Me and Russell Palomet’, the narrator daydreams about the ‘super emperor bed’ he’ll enjoy on holiday, despite having been kidnapped on the way to the airport by a demonic force. In ‘Catmint’, the storyteller fixates on a picturesque sky while guests at his birthday party max out his credit cards; and in ‘A Goshawk’, a plague of stepdads annoy people with their niche obsessions following an ‘interest rate hike by the Bank of England’. What unites this collection is an awareness of the role of language – particularly the cutesy, hyperbolic, online-inflected dialect of millennials – in softening an unforgiving world: hell mornings; dining-slash-play areas; steppies (stepfathers); shoffices (shed offices). They are terms with the ring of marketing guff that connote grief, forced compromises, struggles and decline.

The late theorist Mark Fisher described such aesthetics as boring dystopias – a risky territory for a writer. At times, Pester’s tone does indeed grate, and his frequent use of second-person narration, which has the effect of placing the reader on the end of the hook, can be repetitious. Whether you’ll play along, however, will ultimately depend on whether you accept Sail Away Land’s obvious premise: that a society as grotesque as ours can only be caricatured in bludgeoning phantasmagoria.