Paperbacks: JPod; Phobic: Modern Horror Stories; Dream Angus; The Language of God; Taking Liberties

JPod, by Douglas Coupland (Bloomsbury £7.99)

JPod is Coupland's second novel about a group of computer geeks who've been holed up at a software company, binge-eating on popular culture and spewing out computer code. It's Microserfs version 2.0, then, so what's new in this update?

Microserfs was pre-Windows 95 and its characters were living and working at the epicentre of the Silicon Valley hi-tech boom. The JPodders meanwhile are based in Vancouver, working on a skateboarding game that was hardly going to be revolutionary, even before management sabotaged it with their insistence that it should feature a "trendy" talking turtle character. They're nostalgic for the recent technological past, and while away their time Googling and seeing who can write the best stalking letter to Ronald McDonald. The narrative is interspersed with pages of the equivalent of junk code: random word lists, the ingredients and nutritional content of Doritos, the first 100,000 digits of pi. And in keeping with the modern-life-is-random theme, the novel features ballroom dancers, a dead biker, militant lesbians and a trip to a Chinese sweatshop, but never actually goes anywhere.

The first line of reported speech in JPod is "Oh God. I feel like a refugee from a Douglas Coupland novel." Coupland turns up as a character towards the end, at which point the novel really starts eating itself, and the reader decides that he's been played for a fool. The question is, has the inveterate neologist and pre-eminent chronicler of our times fallen behind and run out of ideas, or is this the book that most exactly mirrors the Google era?

Phobic: Modern Horror Stories, ed Andy Murray (Comma £7.95)

Comma Press is a small but dedicated publisher of short fiction. By asking for horror stories "contemporary in setting and feel", it has attracted by far its most starry line-up of writers to date. Ramsay Campbell offers a stylish update of Poe's "The Premature Burial", Conrad Williams tortures an antiquarian book dealer with a gruesome recurring vision that then comes true, and Nicholas Royle taps into that most contemporary of fears, child abduction, in his story about a young family on a trip to Lancashire.

Best known for spoofing horror conventions on television, Matt Holness (aka Garth Marenghi) and Jeremy Dyson (one of the League of Gentlemen) both play it straight here, to good effect. Frank Cottrell Boyce, Michael Winterbottom's regular screenwriter, also keeps a poker-straight face in telling his story about a Teletubby and a Tweenie that have a sinister glint in their eyes. Hanif Kureishi's contribution is probably the most surprising, and perhaps the most effective too: a brutal, straight-to-the-chase two-pager about a motiveless attack on a woman and child. An effective collection.

Dream Angus, by Alexander McCall Smith (Canongate £6.99)

Canongate's Myths series has inspired some of the most appealing recent work of several established authors, and some of the most accessible and vivid versions of familiar old tales. I'm unqualified to judge whether this is the case with Alexander McCall Smith's retelling of the Celtic myth of Dream Angus, being hardly familiar with either, but I'm still willing to bet that it is. His prose here is clean, unfussy and subtle.

Angus was born on a riverbank to a water nymph, Boann. An Eros figure, he comes to us at night and bestows dreams. While weaving several vignettes of his own devising into Angus's story, in which he explores the space that exists between people and the ultimate isolation of the self, McCall Smith describes how Boann was tricked by the god Dagda. She was seduced, then conceived, carried and gave birth to Angus, and had him taken away from her, all while her husband stood frozen in time. When her unknowing husband is revived he's puzzled by her sadness and puts it down to a bad dream. "He put his arms around her to comfort her, but she was water." What a lyrical and economical way to express a sad truth.

The Language of God, by Francis Collins (Pocket Books £8.99)

Collins's book aims to persuade us that it's perfectly possible to hold religious and scientific beliefs at the same time. He trained in astrophysics and medicine, before achieving worldwide prominence as the leader of the Human Genome Project; he found God in his twenties while tending to patients. If he says it's possible to believe in both scientific progress and God, then clearly it is.

But he also tries to argue that there are intellectually compelling reasons for the scientifically minded to have religious faith, and ultimately fails. The claim that there exists in humans an innate moral law and an innate sense of spiritual yearning, which can't be accounted for by Darwinian evolution, has been refuted by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and many others. Collins's other main point - that the universe is too finely tuned to have been an accident - does have the rationalists stumped. But if it was created by God then God is an even more perfect - and thus implausible - entity. Still, Collins's arguments are thought-provoking, and his call for a truce between the two cultures is appealing.

Taking Liberties, by Chris Atkins, Sarah Bee and Fiona Button (Revolver £7.99)

Like the recently released documentary that it's the book of, this strains rather too hard to attain a punchy tone, and falls well short of the standard set by left-wing comic writers such as Mark Thomas or Michael Moore. But if a few gags are laboured, it's only because the authors are so laudably earnest in their desire to show us that we are in serious danger of losing our liberty.

The New Labour government has, since 9/11 and 7/7, been re-writing the rule of law and eroding our civil liberties, all, purportedly, in the name of protecting our liberty. The 2000 Terrorism Act gave the police unlimited powers to stop and search, and the government the power to proscribe non-violent organisations. As far as we know this hasn't prevented the spread of terrorism, but it has regularly been used to face down peaceful protest. Meanwhile the 2005 Serious Organised Crime and Police Act banned protest within the vicinity of Parliament without permission, so we have to shout louder if we want our government to hear us. This book shows that there is plenty we should be shouting about.