Fowler plays similar games with his readers - recklessly revealing the mechanics of his narrative, while maintaining engagement through deft characterisation, brilliant pacing and relentless invention. But what really makes it work is his radical belief that readers of genre fiction can be every bit as witty, intelligent, well read and culturally informed as the author.

On one level Rune, originally published in 1990, is a splendidly plotted supernatural thriller. Advertising executive Harry Buckingham’s well ordered life collapses into chaos when his father is killed in a grotesque traffic accident. When Harry tracks down the truck driver who may be responsible, she turns out to be Grace - a mercurial wannabe artist with a shaven head and a tendency to interpret her life through old movies. The quest to discover the reason for his father’s strange behaviour before the accident leads Harry and Grace into a web of occult murder, at the centre of which is the predatory ODEL corporation and its satanic chief executive Daniel Carmody.

There are some dazzling set pieces: Harry grovelling in the rose bed at the Carmody mansion after a appalling demonic vision, a terrifying siege in a dilapidated library and a chain of gruesome, strangely interrelated and puzzling deaths.

And there’s a characteristically eccentric bunch of supporting characters, including Dorothy, an aged librarian with a wealth of arcane knowledge; Rufus, a nine year old street punk with an IQ of 170; and, making one of their earliest appearances in Fowler’s fiction, elderly oddball detectives Bryant and May.

There are few writers with Fowler’s skill in looting and re-mixing genre elements. The book is prefaced with a declaration of its debt to MR James’ tale of a runic curse, Casting the Runes, and its film adaptation by Jacques Tourner, Night of the Demon. While Rune can be read as an updated rehash of James’ classic story - complete with electronically mediated runic curses - its plot is peppered with pastiches of a raft of cinematic genres: there are nods and winks to 1980s ‘yuppie nightmare’ movies like Something Wild, the conspiracy thrillers of Alan J Pakula and British comedy-horror films of the 1970s like The Abominable Dr Phibes.

‘Spot The Movie’ isn’t the only game on offer here: Fowler packs the narrative with knowing humour - pushing the horror thriller to its limit by exaggerating its traditions in terms of structure, character and plot. He is so accomplished a storyteller that narrative tension is maintained in spite of his tendency to simultaneously celebrate and lampoon his chosen form. At times, he seems to flirt with the idea of undermining the sense of mystery he has so carefully constructed: for example, early in the plot a heavy hint about the modus operandi of the murders is casually tossed into a supporting character’s musings on the deleterious effects of television on literacy.

But the satire isn’t limited to gentle mockery of the overused elements of genre fiction - there’s also more trenchant material with a more serious objective. It has been suggested that Fowler’s obsession with a narrow range of themes limits his writing, but what’s wrong with repeatedly ploughing the same ground as long as it remains fertile? After all, this approach served Dennis Potter well enough. Fowler’s own recurrent concerns are right-wing conspiracies, moral corruption, social conformity and our obsession with class, power and money. In terms of his handling of these issues it’s interesting to compare Rune, first published at the end of Margaret Thatcher’s reign in Britain, with his most recent book, Disturbia (1997).

At the centre of Rune is a multinational corporation promoting its particularly rapacious form of capitalism aiming for global domination through high technology and ancient occult power. It’s almost invincible, but at least Harry comes to understand what he’s fighting. In 1990, at a time when Thatcherism and Reaganomics had placed the ‘greed is good’ ethos firmly in the ascendancy, opposition and idealism were still a possibility.

The League of Prometheus in Disturbia is, on the surface, a less far reaching conspiracy - relying on coercion and physical violence rather than supernatural curses. But this later tale is far more unsettling and pessimistic than Rune: the ‘enemy’ is harder to identify and there’s a greater emphasis on the seductive and corrupting effects of money and power. The perfect fable for an era in which a Labour Prime Minister enjoys a ‘working relationship’ with Rupert Murdoch.

No-one reports on the state of the nation in as entertaining and offbeat a way as Fowler. The treatment of his themes in recent books like Spanky, Psychoville and Disturbia may be more subtle and complex, but this is a welcome reissue for a thoroughly engaging tale of urban horror.