[Welcome to Rue Morgue's newest column, Hell's Shelves. Novelist and journalist Alan Kelly will use his hard-won chunk of our unreal estate to explore the best in genre fiction, from the small-press to the experimental to the mainstream. In the first installment, Alan chats up Lauren Beukes, author of Moxyland and Zoo City.]

If South African writer Lauren Beukes hasn’t already attracted a cult following with her debut novel Moxyland, she is sure to score a big hit with her follow-up Zoo City. A book with all the hardboiled trappings of Mickey Spillane spliced with the deadly, ethereal edge of Caitlín R. Kiernan and the socio-political bent of Margaret Atwood, Zoo City is a genre-defying, post-modern gallimaufry of shamanism, spiritual familiars, guilt, redemption and social isolation, packaged with more than enough violent grit and eye-watering shocks to appeal to even the most jaded of horror aficionados.