Ripper by Isabel Allende – review

Isabel Allende: 'generosity with fictional detail, warmth and humanity'. Photograph: Javier Soriano/ AFP/ Getty Images

The Chilean writer known for her exuberant magical realist novels featuring strong women characters (The House of Spirits, Eva Luna) has now ventured into serial-killer territory.

Set in San Francisco, Ripper begins with "The Case of the Misplaced Baseball Bat", a description of a gruesome murder scene: a school security guard is found dead by a class of fourth-graders, bent over a vaulting horse with a baseball bat stuffed into his rectum. Strong stuff indeed; but then Allende's previous works have not shied away from lurid violence, usually to make a political point.

The second half of the prologue hastily introduces an online sleuthing game called Ripper. Seventeen-year-old games master Amanda Martín suggests her cohorts across the world tackle this real-life murder case. Luckily enough for Amanda, she is right in the middle of the action: her father, Bob, is the investigating deputy chief of police and right at the beginning we learn that Amanda's mother, the fragrant Indiana of the healing hands, has disappeared, feared a potential victim of the killer. Amanda's parents have long since split and Indiana's boyfriends – one an ageing playboy, the other a disabled ex-navy Seal – are central players in the drama too, one ending up a murderee and the other a suspect for the series of deaths.

But hard-boiled detective story this ain't: once into the novel proper, Allende's distinctive characterisation methods come into play – detailed, extreme, each with a lengthy backstory, the result is a selection of characters that can strain the boundaries of reality. However, true to form it is Allende's women that engage: Amanda's mother, aromatherapist Indiana, is the heart of the novel. Amanda, although the engine of the plot, is less well drawn and substantially less sympathetic. It is only towards the middle of the novel that Allende gets into her stride and the interweaving threads begin to gain narrative drive and tension.

All in all, Ripper is a curious mix: a literary banquet overflowing with morsels of Nancy Drew, mouthfuls of Agatha Christie, a sprinkle of Barbara Cartland and dashes of James Patterson and Tom Clancy. But the "genre-busting" (that publishing buzzword) combination of detective story and romantic saga is likely to intrigue Allende fans. And while there are many places where Ripper reads like a half-polished experiment, what lingers is Allende's generosity with fictional detail, her warmth and humanity.

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Call Me Burroughs: A Life by Barry Miles – review

William Burroughs in Paris in the 60s: 'He employed art as a kind of telepathic murder'. Photograph: Getty Images

"Call me Burroughs"? I can't imagine William S Burroughs saying anything so anodyne as he extended his bony hand to be shaken. Those who knew him called him other things. During his youth he was likened to a mean, sneaky sheep-killing dog and a walking corpse. In later life he was said to possess an "undertaker look" of woebegone solemnity, and in a film made in Paris in the 1960s he was typecast as Death. During his druggy ramblings in South America, the natives, taking note of his emaciation and palsied pallor, nicknamed him "el hombre invisible". That was his favourite role: he believed that the low-grade violet rays he emitted enabled him to blot himself out, awarding him an out-of-body experience. Barry Miles has bravely set about writing the life of someone who was less a human being than a ghoul, a wraith, or – at his most substantial – a shadow.

Helped by his posthumous, necromantic manner, Burroughs trafficked with occult powers, and employed art as a kind of telepathic murder. People who offended him were transferred to his books to be killed off: in one of his novels he shot a poisoned dart into a landlady who evicted him after his friends tore up the Gideon Bible she had left in his room and peed out of the window. Burroughs's negative charisma was so compelling that he was able to close down a coffee bar in Soho whose Greek owners "gave him sass" and served him toxic cheesecake. All it took was some black magic performed with a camera and a tape recorder, which "altered consciousness and subverted the space-time continuum", sending the superstitious Greeks into retreat.

Burroughs's evil eye was supplemented with a terrorist's arsenal. He began firing guns at the age of eight, toted pistols and semi-automatics everywhere, and as an extra precaution acquired a cane with a sword concealed inside it and another cane that fired cartridges. His sport in the South American jungle was blasting innocent melons to a pulp, and in Mexico City he tried out a novel mode of pest control, stringing up live mice and blowing their little heads off. As a child, it was not enough for him to swat a fly: he used his chemistry set to make ammonium iodide, hurled the powder at the buzzing insects, then cheered as they "exploded in little puffs of purple vapour".

The determining event in Burroughs's life was just such an act of carnage. At a party in 1951, he played a William Tell game with his wife Joan, who, while tanked up on tequila, balanced a glass on her head so he could fire at it. His aim was wonky, the bullet entered her temple, and she died. Burroughs had already experimented with other careers – he farmed cotton in Texas, worked as a private eye spying on adulterers in Chicago, rolled drunks on the New York subway, and had grandiose dreams of dynamiting an armoured truck and absconding with a fortune – but it was his killing of his wife, in Miles's opinion, that turned him into a writer, afflicting him with a sense of guilt that made him examine the contents of his haunted head. Sympathisers assured him that Joan's death was not his fault. Brion Gysin declared that the gun was fired by an ugly spirit; Allen Ginsberg misogynistically proposed that Joan willed Burroughs to shoot her, which meant that she committed suicide. The culprit, however, accepted that he was under the control of a "completely malevolent force", and the novels he wrote after Naked Lunch were about his struggles with this indwelling demon.

Luckily, Miles's biography is more than a record of damage, dementia and the systematic derangement of the senses – though it is all that, as well as providing enough details about its gay subject's sexual tastes to satisfy the most prurient, along with an exact calibration of his penis size (unimpressive). Burroughs appears here warts and all, and the warts, I can reveal, are rectal. But Miles can't suppress his affection and admiration for this cranky, cadaverous ogre.

Burroughs had, at the very least, extraordinary powers of recuperation. He was self-destructive, even self-mutilating: when an adolescent infatuation with a schoolmate turned sour he chopped off the top of his little finger with poultry shears intended for carving the Thanksgiving turkey. In Bogotá, where he was searching for a hallucinogenic vine that guaranteed the ultimate trip, a medicine man overdosed him with a potion that had killed another seeker a month before. Burroughs spent four hours in a delirium, convulsed by nausea and vomiting at 10-minute intervals. He then found his Nembutal, crawled to a stream so he could swill the tablets down, and passed out. "The next morning," Miles reports, "feeling fine, he walked back to town."

As a co-founder of the hippie newspaper International Times, Miles got to know Burroughs while he was living in London in the 1960s, and the most endearing parts of the biography concern this English phase of Burroughs's itinerant life. He hired a succession of semi-criminal Dilly boys for sex, but also kept company with effete, eccentric aristocrats and felt entirely at home in this genteel culture. One of his early heroes was the snobbish dandy Beau Brummel, and Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, impressed by the shyness and good manners that alternated with his seismic spasms of violence, likened him to the winsome blue boy in Gainsborough's painting. Another of his models, whom he impersonated when wearing drag, was Dame Edith Sitwell, a "sinister old lesbian". He also bore a passing resemblance to Sherlock Holmes, who shared his fondness for injecting cocaine. Friends were amused by his anglo affectations: he shopped at Fortnum & Mason, ate at Rules, where he ostentatiously tipped the carver, smoked Senior Service fags, and after swallowing balls of raw black opium smuggled in from Thailand always insisted on a nice cup of Earl Grey tea as a chaser.

Miles acknowledges the savagery of Burroughs, whose "cut-up" method of collaging texts was applied to his personal relationships: he once remorselessly cut up his old friend Ginsberg, shredding him with his tongue not a blade. But this book is a corrective to earlier, more freakish accounts, and it made me wonder whether Burroughs was less a writer than a performer, adept at transforming his kinks into black comedy. His narratives derive from "routines" that he tried out on friends, elaborating anecdotes into arias of obscenity and outrage like Dame Edna at her most rampant. He needed "receivers", not readers but an audience whose responses he could hear and see, and as Miles points out he treated Naked Lunch as a set of free-associating vaudeville turns, which in later years he hilariously acted out on his reading tours.

Paul Bowles, who knew Burroughs during his years in Tangier, said of him: "He is always humorous, even at his most vitriolic," and brilliantly defined him – referring to a homespun comedian from the heartland, beloved in the 1930s – as "a sophisticated Will Rogers". It's odd but agreeable to think of the depraved and murderous Burroughs as funny not fiendish. Thanks to Miles, the undead old devil here enjoys the last laugh.

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The News: A User's Manual by Alain de Botton – review

Alain de Botton: 'fizzing with ideas'. Photograph: Karen Robinson

The anxious question journalists ask themselves every morning seems simple enough, but is often devilishly difficult: What is newsworthy? (And where the hell can I find enough of it to fill page one?) Alain de Botton, staging yet another of his philosophical firework displays, asks a rather different question. Here is a construct he calls The News. What is it, and does obsessing over it do us any good? Enter Hegel, Tolstoy, Sophocles and WH Auden, among many others, expert witnesses in his diverting, often infuriating quest to pin down the reasons why we dutifully switch on a radio at one or a TV at six in order to be told that This (or That) is The News.

Diverting? Of course. De Botton fizzes with ideas. A Teesside doctor downloads more than 1,300 child porn images, is caught, tried and jailed. His wife and their newborn baby leave him. He tries to commit suicide, and fails. It's a morose, mundane yarn. But "no less sad than the plotline of Madame Bovary or Hamlet – and, let's argue, the character of the doctor is not fundamentally any worse; Hamlet is, after all, a murderer, and Emma Bovary is guilty of extreme child cruelty". Why don't we sense great tragedy in these column inches? Or is the tragedy we see, and the fear that we, too, could somehow be laid low by Disaster or Accident (two of his chapter headings), the reason why the doctor's downfall is news?

Here, though, De Botton can be infuriating as well as stimulating. He pronounces from a philosopher's lofty chair. He does nothing you could call probing research. He merely analyses what he sees – and that can be naively obvious. He wants fewer bare facts in The News and more context and explanation. Fairness and balance? They only make sense as part of an overarching narrative (which can also be called bias). Put aside the twists and turns of economic reporting. Seek economic understanding instead. Don't make politics boring. And, while you're struggling to do better, rediscover an abiding interest in foreign affairs. De Botton wonders plangently why Uganda is so sparsely covered.

These are all worthy areas, to be sure. They are what intelligent, concerned citizens ought to want to know about the world that surrounds them. Perhaps, two centuries ago, the general populace could manage without The News most of the time. But now it's omnipresent, inescapable and, on this thesis, stuck in too many arcane ruts, pandering to fear and pessimism, relishing disappointment.

Yet you can't make the whole journey merely by playing the dissatisfied consumer. You have to turn the mirror the other way and, perhaps, find an editor to examine his latest "reading and noting" survey in which those consumers actually tell him what they read one morning. That political lead story about improving growth statistics? Switched off after the first two paragraphs. Those grim tidings from Uganda as the peace agreements in the north of the country come under strain? Sampled by 2% of your customers, mostly in the FO and Soas. But "Swiss-born philosopher faces new book crisis"? De Botton has whizzed to that first.

News starts with you, your family, your interests, your street. It expands via TV, captured by the people and lives you see on screen. (It was more interested in foreign coverage when it seemed the cold war could destroy us all at the push of a button). It is a box of fragments you try to assemble for yourself, rather than a finished jigsaw. Which means that it can't be pinned down in a handy user's guide. But at least it's worth thinking about constantly, fine, frisky, philosophical minds applied. For the construct is you.

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Nemesis by Jo Nesbo - review

Are the police running out of solutions? They've been through the footage hundreds of times and they've searched for finger prints twice as long asnormal but nothing. Not a hint or a clue, not even a trace of evidence. The bank was robbed with not a single lead to go by. This thief was a pro, however he's not happy with one bank robbery, he's striking everywhere.

This book is about a police officer named Harry Hole who has been in the robberies department for years and knows all the tricks of a first class thief. However this one is different, it was all over in a matter of minutes.

One night, in the midst of the case, he goes to visit an old flame. Little does he know that she 'committed suicide' on the very same night but he doesn't believe it. Suspicion is aroused as the secret gets out, so how will Harry solve the case if the whole town suspects him?

I really got myself stuck into this book because when I was reading it I didn't want to stop but I found that once I had stopped reading it was hard to get back into. Putting that aside, I wasn't quite sure if it was a murder mystery or a detective story but either way it was brilliant. I quite liked the main character Harry Hole as he seemed quite down to earth and natural with a hint of sarcasm and had a touch of cynicism (perhaps a bit too much). However, I didn't hear much of his colleague Beatte Lonn but what you did get out from her she seemed perhaps out of place but nice all the same.

All in all, I think the mystery element was very well set out but dragged on a bit and I found the ending very unpredictable but I wasn't quite satisfied with it. I also found that the real bad guy wasn't found out yet so I'm guessing it's revealed in one of the later books.

Sorry to moan, but it took a while to get into at the beginning and I was starting to have doubts but when you got further into the story it gets more of a grip on your and you feel like you're in the moment looking for unknown evidence.

I love this book and would recommend it to anyone. It has been set out perfectly and is very well written thanks to the author. I'm determined to read more of his books and finish the series.

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Son of a Gun by Justin St Germain – review

'Elegiac melancholy': Justin St Germain in Tombstone, Arizona. Photograph: Steve Craft for the Guardian

In September 2001, in the shimmering Arizona desert, a man shot his wife dead with her own gun, a Beretta 21. The victim was the author's mother. Justin St Germain was 20 then. This book tells his story – and his mother's.

Son of a Gun recounts a happy enough childhood in Tombstone, Arizona, a dusty, moribund place famous for the gunfight at the OK Corral. Stepfathers drifted in and out of the author's life. For a short period, he lived with his brother and their mother in an adobe shack in Tombstone. "It was the worst place we ever lived," he writes, "but I loved it like no other, because for a brief while there were no men around, just Mom and Josh and me."

Interlacing past and present, St Germain sketches his own background while alternately unravelling the murder itself. At the time of his mother's death, he was failing in college in Tucson and in debt. After the event, playing the role of investigative journalist, he tracked down some of the stepfathers. Canadian Max beat Debbie up (he wasn't the only one) and the author remembers the police sirens. Determined to unravel the murder, he excavates crime reports and interviews the first officer on the scene. Having recovered his mother's effects, he watches her patting her horses on old videos and listens to her voice on cassettes.

Ray, a cop, was Debbie's fifth husband (the author's father left the family when the boy was two). He was found dead in his pick-up a few months after the killing, and in his quest to understand, St Germain visits the spot where Ray shot himself too and looks at police photographs of maggots crawling over his corpse as it broiled.

Son of a Gun charts a journey through grief. St Germain confronts the problem of too much condolence, of "hoarding rage in my heart", of girlfriends who look worried when he gets angry. He attends a support group for relatives of murder victims, because "I need to see if I'm really as alone as I feel, or if there are others", and he identifies the various stages of grief: "The zombie phase, the denial phase, the rage phase, the writing-a-book-about-it phase." But in the end he acknowledges that he was looking for an answer when there wasn't one.

The murder took place the week after 9/11. St Germain notes that both events mark an ineradicable line between past and present, one personal and one national, and both a kind of parable of the Fall. Similarly, he adroitly uses Wyatt Earp and the gunfight at the OK Corral as a counterpoint to his own story.

Now a university teacher, the author hints that he has found some small measure of peace and healing. He moves in with a good woman – "Since I met her, failure doesn't seem so certain any more" – though still sleeps with a loaded revolver under his bed. He writes of "the choice I make every day: what kind of man to be?"

St Germain has a strong narrative voice that never wavers. There is much talk of sadness, helplessness and drink, but these pages never topple into self-pity. The elegiac melancholy of the prose lifts this book far above the standard coming-to-terms-with-tragedy memoir. The author conjures the remorseless trickling sweat of the southwest, the deadbeat self-defeat of its small towns, the decaying gas stations and the smell of dirt and greasewood. His language is parsed, effectively enabling him to skewer a character on the page. His father, who reappears after the murder, "liked to make small talk; it was the only kind he was good at".

In the final paragraph of this startlingly good book, St Germain imagines his mother's last moment.

"As a shadow arm rose on the wall, as she braced for the bullet, she would have tried to speak to her sons. We might not hear her now. We might not think we could. But she believed that one day we would hear her voice again and know that she had never left us."

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Rewind TV: Scandimania; Salamander; Royal Cousins at War; Culture Show: Hanif Kureishi – review

Culture and culinary treats: Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (above right) with Swedish chef Niklas Ekstedt in Scandimania. Photograph: Keo Films

Scandimania (C4) | 4OD

Salamander (BBC4) | iPlayer

Royal Cousins at War: A House Divided (BBC2) | iPlayer

Culture Show: Hanif Kureishi – Writers Are Trouble (BBC2) | iPlayer

"The Sun Always Shines on TV" sang those Norwegian pop giants, A-ha, back in the 1980s. Well, not any more it doesn't. Not on Scandinavian TV.

The sun is to Scandinavian TV what topless darts is to Saudi TV: an intriguing concept but not something you ever expect to see. For a sunless sky is one of the aesthetic principles of Nordic noir such as The Bridge and The Killing, and Nordic noir is one of the cliches that fill a thick duvet of mythology obscuring our view of Sweden, Denmark and Norway.

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall set out to give that duvet a thorough shaking down in the three-part Scandimania, or, as he put it, to crack the "Norse code". It was a good idea, and an added bonus that HFW was branching out from the cooking show format. I like his confidential intelligence, the way he seems to be thinking out loud just to you, but I could happily live the rest of my life without watching another pinny-clad personality try to infuse meaning into chopping garlic.

Perhaps inevitably, though, he seemed less interested in getting to grips with reality in Sweden, the subject of the first instalment, than sampling the local food – in particular an elk's liver that he cooked shortly after the beast had been shot and gutted.

There was something a little indecent about the lip-smacking haste with which he tucked into the poor dear's viscera, but then the whole film moved at giddying speed. Here's Björn from Abba, here's a forest, here's a lake, here's Hugh in an outdoor tub, here's a government off-licence, here's a glamorous suburb, here's an alienated immigrant – that's the politics sorted.

The result of all the frenetic activity is that it wasn't clear if HFW was trying to challenge the cliches or simply reaffirm them. It was as if the producers lacked confidence that their foodie presenter could do a social travelogue and so they crammed so much in that he never had to do more than be charming and make a few semi-humorous observations.

But I suspect HFW has more going for him than an engaging manner, just as Sweden is more than a series of quirky snapshots. The Norse code remained securely encrypted, although we did learn one important lesson: the taste of elk's liver doesn't appear worth killing its owner for.

Filip Peeters in Salamander: 'Belgium won't be winning any trophies for cop shows.' Photograph: Lies Willaert/BBC/Skyline Entertainment/Beta Film

With the second series of The Bridge over, the Saturday schedules had a vacancy for a European detective series. And as with national airlines and football teams, every European state has one, even Belgium. Actually, Belgium has a rather good national football side, but judging by Salamander, which filled the slot, it's not going to win any trophies for cop shows.

It started strongly with a near wordless bank heist but ran into trouble as soon as the characters started talking. Perhaps the dialogue was more textured in Flemish, but I'm not sure much was lost in translation. Certainly the translator's rendering of the word "fock" suggested a linguistic diligence that left nothing to the viewer's guesswork.

The detective Paul Gerardi (Filip Peeters) was a collection of well-worn tropes in a predictably crumpled outfit with a standard unshaved look and a familiar anti-authority attitude. He was warned by his seniors not to investigate the bank raid because it compromised powerful individuals. But did he listen?

Thus he found himself under secret service surveillance. Luckily, however, Belgium's security experts appeared ignorant of the fact that houses tend to come with back doors and our hero was free. And boy, was the public prosecutor cross! In a performance that showed courageous indifference to subtlety, he ranted and raved like Eugène Terre'Blanche on one of his angrier days.

Belgium is a country that is not entirely at home with its political system. Recently it operated for almost two years without a government, and it's never really recovered its trust in the criminal justice system after the debacle of the Marc Dutroux case. So it's ripe for a good conspiracy yarn, but a good conspiracy requires a slow build and a gradual reveal and this was more like a paranoiac's view of The Powers That Be. As one character put it: "There are limits. Even in this country."

Cousins Tsar Nicholas II and King George V on the Isle of Wight, 1909: soon both their nations would be at war with Germany. Photograph: Topfoto/BBC/Blakeway Productions

I used to think that Belgium was the main battleground of the first world war but it turns out the real action was within the interlinked royal families of Europe. Royal Cousins at War told the story of our King George V, Tsar Nicolas II of Russia and Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II, who were grandchildren (or married to one in Nicolas's case) of Queen Victoria.

None of them was exactly an advert for interbreeding, but in a highly competitive field the kaiser edged it as the most damaged of the three. He was born with a paralysed arm and his ascent to power was like a Shakespearean tragedy rewritten by Freud. He had sexual fantasies about his mother and held a murderous hatred for his uncle (Edward VII), presented himself as a Wagnerian warrior but loved flower arranging and jewellery design.

While George V and Nicolas II were close, Wilhelm felt isolated and under-appreciated. It would be crass to suggest, as the documentary came close to doing, that this led to Germany's war with Britain and Russia. But he obviously did nothing to stem the growth of German militarism.

It seems extraordinary that 10 million soldiers went to their deaths fighting for nations with these clowns as their figureheads. A fitting epitaph to this extended nightmare of a family is that when Nicolas II was overthrown in the Russian revolution he was offered asylum in the UK. But his loving cousin intervened to prevent it. When the Romanovs were killed by the Bolsheviks, George V let Lloyd George take the blame.

Worse than having a royal for a cousin is having a writer for a son or a husband. That seemed to be Alan Yentob's contention in a Culture Show special on Hanif Kureishi. "Writers are trouble, Alan," Kureishi drawled. What the film never established was whether in his case the trouble was worth it. But perhaps Kureishi was the wrong person to ask.

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Why do images of abandoned Japanese island Hashima haunt us?

Hashima, an island near Nagasaki also known as Gunkanjima, was abandoned in 1974. Photograph: Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre

'Many times we would enter huge art deco buildings with once-beautiful chandeliers, ornate columns and extraordinary frescoes and everything was crumbling and covered in dust and the sense that you had entered a lost world was almost overwhelming."

These are the words of the French photographer Yves Marchand who, with Romain Meffre, created one of the most talked-about photography books of recent times, The Ruins of Detroit, published in 2011. It portrayed the once-great American industrial city as a kind of lost world, where, as Marchand put it, "the magnificence of the past is everywhere evident".

Their photographs of abandoned ballrooms, theatres, police stations and entire blocks of once-ornate art deco-style buildings struck a chord worldwide. When I interviewed them just after the book's publication, the resulting feature and picture gallery became one of the most-viewed online stories on this paper's website.

In terms of our current collective fascination with abandoned places, the publication of The Ruins of Detroit was a tipping point, the moment when a curiosity turned into an obsession, as a cursory Google search of "abandoned places" will attest. It has grown into an online subculture, where newly discovered abandoned places are constantly photographed and the results shared via websites, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

The titles of the websites give some indication of the content as well as the lure of the old, crumbling and derelict: Abandoned Places, Deserted Places, The Most Haunting Abandoned Places on Earth, 31 Haunting Images of Abandoned Places That Will Give You Goose Bumps. Among the celebrities who have been given goosebumps and tweeted about it are Kendrick Lamar ("breathtaking"), Jared Leto ("bizarrely beautiful"), Jeremy Vine ("ace") and Bianca Jagger ("fascinating"), while writers such as Margaret Atwood and Anne Rice have also expressed their fascination with empty buildings.

Initially, it is not hard to see why many of the images on these sites exert such a hold on the collective imagination. As the adjectives most often used to describe them – nostalgic, romantic, haunting – suggest, there is something paradoxically beautiful, not to say seductive, about decaying buildings, particularly ones that were once baroquely magnificent.

An abandoned military gymnasium in Brandenburg, Germany, 2010. Photograph: Thomas Jorion

Many of the ruined mansions exert the same sort of fascination as certain passages from Victorian or gothic literature – Dickens's evocation of Miss Havisham's crumbling house in Great Expectations, Mervyn Peake's descriptions of the labyrinthine halls and corridors of Gormenghast castle – while suggesting the decline and fall of great families or dynasties.

Then there are the images of cities or entire landscapes that have been deserted and left desolate, whether swaths of downtown Detroit or the modern ghost towns that border Chernobyl following the nuclear accident of 1986. In the former, the broader arc of history and commerce is suggested, not just in the decline of a great city, but possibly of a country, an empire. In the latter, our fear of nuclear disaster, and its apocalyptic aftermath, is summoned. Here, too, the precedents are fictional, but they tend to be darker, from the metaphysical chill of TS Eliot's epic poem The Waste Land to post-apocalyptic sci-fi novels, most notably the dystopian and oddly prescient stories of JG Ballard or, more recently, Cormac McCarthy's unremittingly bleak survival novel, The Road.

And, just as certain descriptive passages in Ballard's 1962 novel, The Drowned World – about a flooded future London – seemed to prefigure the fate of New Orleans after the levees broke in 2005, so, too, do many of these photographs presage our own increasingly real fears about global economic meltdown and the increasing ecological fragility of a planet that we have ravaged relentlessly for its natural resources. If this kind of desolation can happen to a major American city, the images in The Ruins of Detroit say, surely it can happen anywhere.

What is revealing, too, while trawling through these images online, is the distinctly postmodern sense that often you are looking at a world that is more familiar from film than real life. The abandoned submarine base in Balaklava, Ukraine is straight out of Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, while the eerily empty and vast subway tunnel in Kiev, Ukraine, could be part of the set for any number of science fiction films, from the Star Trek series to Alien. Likewise, the Mirny diamond mine in eastern Siberia, a vast landscape of dust-coloured, low-lying buildings arranged around an ominously gaping hole in the Earth's surface. The Russians, it seems, do post-apocalyptic sci-fi landscapes better than anyone else.

Elsewhere, though, the photographs of desolate urban landscapes speak of more real than imagined fates. The crumbling interiors of once bustling civic buildings – hospitals, prisons, police stations, libraries, banks – are signifiers, if more were needed, of the indiscriminate thrust of global capitalism. More melancholy still are the ruins of our once-stately pleasure domes and dream palaces: cinemas, theatres and dancehalls figure largely, as do funfairs, their giant wheels and snaking rollercoasters now silent and still as weeds and tall grasses sprout around their stalls.

The dereelict Gulliver's Kingdom theme park in the shadow of Mount Fuji, Japan. Photograph: Martin Mandias Lyle/oldcreeper.com

Somewhere in Japan, the wind whistles though a vast bowling alley where the balls sit motionless, casting long shadows across a floor cluttered with debris. In the shadow of Mount Fuji, a giant Gulliver, built in 1997, lies forever tethered to the ground in a disused theme park, his skin and clothes fading in the elements to the muted colours of the surrounding landscape.

As our fascination grows, it has spawned a network of amateur photographers who locate, shoot, then disseminate their images, many of which are beautifully lit, artfully composed and possibly Photoshopped. They are, in fact, a camera club version of the high-end art-documentary style of photographers such as Marchand and Meffre, or Robert Polidori, whose images of post-hurricane Katrina New Orleans are powerful, disturbing and somewhat unsettling in their artful beauty.

Polidori was dubbed "a connoisseur of chaos" by the New York Times's always astute art critic, Michael Kimmelman, who also noted how "the beauty of his pictures – they have a languid, almost underwater beauty – entails locating order in bedlam".

His unforgettable images of a ruined New Orleans are devoid of people, but they home in, instead, on the often-surreal wreckage – houses moved across streets by the tidal surge, interiors that seem suddenly old and decayed as a result of flood damage.

Kimmelman concedes that "it is only human to feel uneasy about admiring pictures like these… whose sumptuousness can be disorienting", which gets close to the heart of paradox of these images. The late John Updike, in a review of Polidori's book, After the Flood, was more perplexed. "After the Flood is an opulent volume, brilliantly sharp in its large, 10in by 14in reproductions, bound in lavender cloth, and difficult to manipulate anywhere but on a coffee table. It weighs nearly 10lbs and costs $90; a consumeristic paradox hovers over the existence of so costly a volume portraying the reduction of a mostly poor urban area… to a state of desertion and deeper destitution. Who is this book for?"

Though the contemplation of ruins is a long tradition in art and architecture, for some critics, these contemporary images are simply "ruin porn": an aestheticising of urban decay that elevates the beauty of the bleak over the complex socioeconomic reasons for such dramatic urban decline. In his fascinating social history, The Last Days of Detroit, local writer Mark Binelli touched on this seductive nature of once grand and now derelict buildings. "For all the local complaints about ruin porn, outsiders were not alone in their fascination. Among my friends and acquaintances, Phil staged secret, multi-course gourmet meals… in abandoned buildings… John and his buddies played ice hockey on the frozen floors of decrepit factories… Travis was hired to shoot suburban wedding photographs in the ruins of the old Packard plant."

Herein perhaps lies something of the true nature of our fascination with abandoned places: they allow us to look at, even surround ourselves, with the traces of decay and desolation, without actually experiencing the human cost. That there are no people in these photographs is, of course, part of their haunting power, their melancholic force. For the photographers, this is an aesthetic call. As Updike noted, Polidori "loves the grave, delicate and poignant beauty of architecture when the distracting presence of human inhabitants is eliminated from photographs". Like Marchand and Meffre, he is working in a documentary landscape tradition, but one that grows ever more formal and detached.

Marchand and Meffre have since gone on to document the abandoned island city of Hashima in a book called Gunkanjima Only 40 years ago Hashima, which was nicknamed Gunkanjima or Battleship for its shape like a ship, was the most densely populated place in the world. Five thousand people lived in the labyrinthine streets of the tiny island, many working in the coal mine whose excavated slag formed the foundations of a densely packed town that grew upwards. In 1974, the mine closed and, within six months, the last resident returned to the mainland, leaving behind a warren of deserted shops, including a barber, a bank, a bathhouse, schools, a shrine and several shops and restaurants.

Hashima is a ghostly place, made all the more so when you see the old photographs taken when it was inhabited that punctuate their book. A local photographer shot the bustling, overcrowded community in which he lived and worked. It is the ghostly presences of these people that stalk the abandoned streets, shops and houses of Hashima as photographed by Marchand and Meffre.

And it is their life stories, in glimpsed traces – an old TV set, a rusting child's bicycle – that haunt the images of this now empty place. We seem increasingly fascinated by what is left behind – ruins, objects, crumbling facades, empty shells; the beautifully decayed surface of things. But it is the people that left who are the real context for these photographs. Without that human context, they are just bleakly and romantically beautiful, visually seductive but empty of real meaning.

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