In Ben Marcus’s 2013 novel The Flame Alphabet, children’s voices become the vector for a killer virus, their parents protecting themselves by driving needles into their own ears. Creepy as well as funny, it twisted everyday family dynamics into bizarre sci-fi horror.

Marcus’s spectacular new collection of stories does something similar, transplanting ordinary predicaments – tetchy marriages, caring for frail parents, the nuts and bolts of bereavement – to a hazily futuristic America in which public spaces are routinely sprayed with mood-altering mists and privacy-breaching tech firms are inside our heads.

The wickedly effective opening piece follows a father, Martin, whose son, Jonah, coolly announces that he no longer wants to be tucked in at bedtime or, indeed, shown any affection of any kind. “I know that you and Mom are in charge and you make the rules,” he says. “But even though I’m only 10, don’t I have a right not to be touched?”

Martin, through gritted teeth, accepts his wife’s softly-softly response (“I mean, good for him, right?”), even when the boy makes a barely veiled threat to report them at school for sexual abuse if he’s cuddled.

The story is fuelled by Jonah’s uncanny sang-froid, as well as the sense of comically escalating odds being stacked against the protagonist; it turns on Martin’s failure not to blow when he finds that his son has used an Amazon gift card to buy an antisemitic screed about 9/11, a purchase Jonah justifies, maddeningly, by reminding his father how he has always emphasised the importance of keeping an open mind.

In some of these stories, Marcus’s habit of rigging up an eye-catching scenario only to leave it hanging might feel unsatisfying, were it not for the sheer line-by-line joy of his phrase-making, caught between strung-out melancholy and tart misanthropy, electric with thrilling change-ups. In The Boys, a mother of two takes care of her nephews after her sister dies suddenly; soon, she’s cynically accepting cash from her brother-in-law in exchange for a nightly handjob.

When her husband calls, saying their daughters miss her, she glosses it as “poorly encrypted code”: “He meant that the technical side of their upkeep... suffered during my absence. I was needed to receive and relay signals, mostly, to rehearse concern with other parents over the frequently uncertain whereabouts of our children, who would soon be gone. A metal tower might have served the same function, and it wouldn’t need to eat.”

Humming away in the background is the recurring theme of doomy synergy between Silicon Valley and big pharma. In The Grow-Light Blues, a researcher is left disfigured by his company’s bid to make solid food a relic by developing human photosynthesis. You feel Marcus isn’t out to satirise or scaremonger so much as probe the cravings that technology can satisfy.

Another story refers in passing to a former porn star who is now famed for his face and widely streamed as comfort viewing for customers “paying to have eye contact whenever they want”.

One or two of the more self-conscious pieces, such as Critique, styled as an architectural review, fall flat, but it’s exhilaratingly bleak stuff overall: snapshots from a not-so-alternative reality in which love means setting up a Google Alert and you’re better off, as one character thinks, avoiding the hazards of being misunderstood by rejecting speech in order “to just breathe loudly, in different accents, adding a little bit of body English with your face – then the transcript could never come back and fuck you down into the mud”.

• Notes from the Fog by Ben Marcus is published by Granta (£12.99). To order a copy for £11.43 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99