I had wanted to read Mary South's debut collection of stories since first hearing about the US edition, and was delighted to discover the book had found a UK publisher. What I'd read about Forgotten – such as the blurb, which says the stories involve people attempting 'to use technology to escape their uncontrollable feelings of grief or rage or despair' – had given me the impression it would be near-future soft science fiction in the vein of Alexander Weinstein. The opening story seems to have been chosen to underscore that positioning: 'Keith Prime' is narrated by a nurse who must ensure her wards, a group of clones named Keith, are safely kept sedated until their organs are harvested. However, it isn't necessarily typical of the collection.

I'd compare South's work to Xuan Juliana Wang, Lauren Holmes, Jen George and Kristen Roupenian. She's good at unnerving, offputting premises – if not quite body horror, then certainly bodily squeamishness, as in 'The Promised Hostel', where the narrator is one of a group of adult men who take turns breastfeeding from a woman called Maddy. Some are so up-to-the-minute that the concepts might sound a little too calculated: in the title story, a content moderator stalks her rapist online; 'To Save the Universe, We Must Also Save Ourselves' uses the members of an online fan forum as a kind of Greek chorus. Both, however, are razor-sharp. The latter, especially, is a really smart way to portray the way pop culture icons are built up, torn down and dehumanised.

Another couple of standouts: my favourite, 'Architecture for Monsters', is about a 'starchitect' whose work references human anatomy. Parts of it are written as a pitch-perfect imitation of the sort of profile that might appear in a pretentious design magazine (complete with footnotes), and the style is so enjoyable it'd be a pleasure even if it didn't have the best plot in the book. In 'The Age of Love' two staff at a nursing home discover their elderly patients are addicted to phone sex lines, and start making recordings of the calls – a practice that backfires when the narrator's girlfriend falls for the voice of a particularly eloquent octogenarian. Both are pretty funny in what appears to be a dry and deadpan way, yet there's real emotion beneath that. This is a hallmark of the whole book, and particularly apparent in its strongest stories.

Edgy, contemporary, delightfully weird; South's "You will never be forgotten" is a collection of short stories some of which tend towards more realist territory whilst others take a more speculative bent.