A new story collection from Jim Shepard is one of the treats of my reading life. His new book, You Think That’s Bad, is as original and diverse as the previous three, and reminds me most of his brilliant second collection, Love and Hydrogen. What makes Shepard so remarkable is his ability to inhabit wildly different worlds. If a theme runs through You Think That’s Bad, it is isolation, but that skirts around the edges of Shepard’s achievement. His range is limitless – he can and does take you anywhere.

There is a story about two brothers and an emotionally warped love triangle, the main character stuck on the Kokoda track as the Japanese advance invisibly through the suffocating tropical jungle. There is another about the special-effects creator of Godzilla, one about the adventurer Freya Stark, and a disturbingly thrilling tale about a serial killer preying on children in fifteenth-century France. Shepard moves through time and location with seamless, effortless grace, and appears able to write about anything he takes to be interesting. His research, whether it be historical, bibliographical, or a speculative leap into the future, never comes across as information. It is as if he absorbs lives and worlds, and mulls them over before giving them back to us in sharper, purer tones.

Shepard is not read widely in Australia, and this is a mystery to me. His novels are masterful too, and Project X, a thin slip of genius about two misfit high-school boys, is one of my all-time favourite books. He is a master of the interior and of the landscape, and is a prose stylist of extreme elegance. If you haven’t heard of him, look him up; You Think That’s Bad is as good a place to start as any.

Robbie Egan is manager of Readings Carlton