Don't you just hate the coast? You get sunburned, the sand makes you itchy, and then some weird fungus starts growing all over your Mum.

At least, that's the way things often go in Gulpepper, the town at the centre of Alan Baxter's new book, The Gulp. There are five novellas in this collection, all set in the same town. A delivery driver gets stranded when his truck breaks down, and witnesses a horrific crime in the motel room next door. Two teenagers try to hide their mother's death to avoid foster care, and soon find themselves hiding the thing that used to be their Mum. A backpacker goes to a gig at a pub, and his friends refuse to accept that the after party is going on too long, and the band is a tad sinister. (The band members include Shirley, Howard, Edgar and Clarke - their elderly housemate is Bram.) A drug mule who loses $60,000 worth of product has only 48 hours to pay back his terrifying boss. And a lonely fisherman falls head over heels in love... with an egg he's just pulled from the ocean.

The bizarre happenings in these stories only work because Gulpepper feels utterly real - you'll find yourself checking maps to make sure it isn't there. The atmosphere, the activity and the attitude are all spot on for every small Australian coastal town I've ever been to, but not in a way that demean the locals, which is a nice change. The language is great, too. Baxter knows plenty of synonyms for spongy, slimy and rotten, and the music of Blind Eye Moon is so vividly described that I could practically hear it in my head.

I recently read Uzumaki by Junji Ito, which is not unlike The Gulp - a collection of bizarre stories with vaguely linked events all set in one cursed town. In both books, each story builds and builds... and then ends, a bit matter-of-factly, with the reader feeling confused and uneasy. This is cosmic horror, which is heavy on dread and light on explanation. It works better here than in Uzumaki, because the five protagonists of The Gulp all have depth (not hidden depth, since you find out everything about them in the first few of pages of each story, but depth just the same) and while the rest of the cast leans toward the archetypal, nothing seems false or forced. I've heard it said that two-dimensional characters are a feature rather than a bug of cosmic horror, helping to emphasize the insignificance of humans in a threatening universe. I don't agree, and I'm glad that Baxter doesn't seem to either.

It's impossible not to empathise with the doomed heroes in The Gulp. The band are clearly vampires, or werewolves, or something - why won't Ciara listen to Patrick? Those bumps under Troy's skin where you touched the egg are clearly bad news - just go to the doctor, man! Why doesn't everyone just flee this terrible town?! As each protagonist wades deeper and deeper into a mess of his or her own making, you'll find yourself gritting your teeth and clenching your fingernails - in a good way. Tell you what, though, I'm not going to be eating any seafood for a while.