Seven Tales of Sex and Death, by Patricia Duncker

Subversive literary games of sadistic titillation

Patricia Duncker has trouble sleeping at nights. Unlike other novelists who might lull themselves with their favourite passages of Proust or Jane Austen, she watches trash television – B movies in particular. Her latest literary project is a direct response to the images, themes and sheer visceral enjoyment that she finds on her screen.

If one part of Duncker's imagination is steeped in Hollywood clichés, the other is steeped in European literature. She is the most allusive of contemporary writers. From the postmodern playfulness of her first novel, Hallucinating Foucault, through the cross-dressing protagonist of her second, James Miranda Barry, to the Freud- and Frankenstein-influenced ghosts of her third book, The Deadly Space Between, she has delighted in subverting literary genres.

Seven Tales of Sex and Death continues this process. Duncker takes a variety of B-movie clichés – serial killing, rape, sado-masochistic titillation, political violence, closed communities, mysterious strangers and, above all, enigmatic women – and injects them with new life. At the same time, her literary influences range from Ovid to Bruce Chatwin via JG Ballard.

All these tales are written in the first person and all but one of the narrators are women. Most are sexually ambiguous with a preference for lesbianism, a notable exception being a dominatrix prostitute who connives in the murder of her clients.

The settings range from a Greek island where an archaeologist's discovery of the Temple of Zeus appears to let loose the spirit of that rapacious god, through a remote Welsh hillside where three elderly Baptists live alongside a very grisly collection of family relics, to a US military camp in Germany. Four of the stories are set in rural France where English visitors – three of them writers – encounter a very different world from that popularised by Peter Mayle.

The two most powerful tales are both set in the near future. "Sophia Walters Shaw" is a radical reworking of the Orpheus and Euridyce myth. A young hostess at a sadistic nightclub, The Underworld, describes both the club acts ("We very seldom actually kill our performers. There are specialist clubs for all that, but they're small, exclusive and have government clearance") and her own extramural activities ("I had imagined we were an independent exotic sex agency; in fact we were assassins") in chillingly matter-of-fact tones. After killing a politician, she rescues his wife and, in keeping with the feminist reworking, leads her away from the underworld to be reunited with her mother.

The other futuristic story is "Strike", a brilliantly apocalyptic vision of what occurs when a French lorry-drivers' strike spreads to workers in other industries (and other countries). It leads first to the breakdown of essential services and then to that of civilisation itself. The middle-aged English narrator has to rely on her peasant neighbours and, when they are abducted, is forced to walk across a French landscape totally deserted apart from a solitary priest.

This is a wonderfully engaging and rewarding collection, shot through with wit and perversity. It both deepens and darkens the themes of Duncker's earlier work, while significantly extending her range. Insomnia has rarely paid such rich dividends.