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I kind of liked Kalder’s debut effort, Lost Cosmonaut. But Strange Telescopes is a much more engaging and mature work by a writer who’s clearly grown up and found himself in between books. This is Kalder without much of the glibness and arrogance that characterised Cosmonaut. The dark edge is still there, but it’s all the sharper for the subtlety.

Strange Telescopes is an examination of four Russian eccentrics. Actually, eccentric may be the wrong word. Kalder’s first subject, Vadim Mikhailov, who explores subterranean Moscow is clearly an eccentric, as is the film-maker obsessed with exorcism. But it’s hard to call Vissarion, a cult leader who claims to be a reincarnation of Jesus, merely eccentric. Kalder’s final study, Nikolai Sutyagin, who built a teetering wooden tower, seems the most normal of the lot. The common thread that Kalder finds is that all these men are engaged in the creation of their own realities. By accepting their realities for a while, Kalder is able to examine how it works.

It’s fascinating. Pretty much all the criticisms I leveled at Cosmonaut are fixed in Strange Telescopes. It’s a very good book and Kalder’s style is dry, witty, refreshingly dark and cynical. The pacing is problematic – Kalder’s apt to ramble around his subject for a while. The excorcist chapters dragged a bit for me. For the most part though, your patience is rewarded.