It's a fitting way to begin a book that stages its own struggle with inherited conventions of form, genre and style, and cycles speedily, even hastily, through several possible responses. For Communion Town, subtitled "A City in Ten Chapters", the further implication of the motto is that cities are not single but several; they not only change over time but present different versions of themselves to the people who pass through them. "Is it impossible," a character asks, "that among my contemporaries, in the very same streets and lecture theatres, some moved in a rare and secretive world?"

People in Communion Town keep finding other people's cities crammed into places they thought they knew, which makes for an ongoing process of urban renewal. And this in turn engenders a parallel work of literary recuperation. Characters come and go, passing transformed but recognisable between stories. We encounter a 1940s-style gumshoe and a Holmesian detective; an abattoir shift-worker and a child at play; drinkers and teachers; serial killers and jeunesses dorées.

Communion Town is ambitious and Thompson's prose is well wrought, at times maybe overwrought. There are sweeping cinematic passages and moments of fine-grained detail: a butcher's stall displays cuts of meat "in their shades of lavender, plum, pastel and candy-pink"; a wall is covered by "great pale maps of mildew". Then again, as a character considers the consequences of an action, "Ramifications knit in his head." To ramify is to branch out; to knit is to weave. The conceit is too full of its own metaphors, too full of itself.

Sam Thompson's Booker-longlisted debut rests on a premise similar to that of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, comprising subtly linked tales, here concerning a nightmarish city. The title story is transfixing. A wheedling voice tries to lure a female immigrant from her incarcerated boyfriend. The narrator is craven, creepy, revealing that he has been spying, almost in a supernatural way. ("Locked doors aren't a problem.") Despite attempting to ingratiate himself, he is chillingly cold about the shocking events commonplace in this city of extremes: strangers collapsing on the city's streets; terrorist attacks that force ordinary people into contact with the "monsters" who survive in the city's underbelly.

In Thompson's city the majority live in deprivation. Slums are described with visceral power. The "half-demolished high-rise with the open sockets of bedrooms" conjures up a bleeding mouth with rotten molars gouged out. In "The Song of Serelight Fair", a rickshaw boy falls for a volatile female passenger. She takes him to society events where the inhumane treatment of the working class is taken to dystopian extremes: serving staff are fitted with music boxes in their chests to entertain clients, and punished if they don't comply with passes made by the patrons. A play mirrors the boy's fate, but he fails to take warning.

These first two stories epitomise the book's strange, haunting motifs. Evil looms. In "A Good Slaughter", an abattoir worker is convinced that his boss is the city's notorious murderer – but he may be dangerously deluded. In "Gallanthea", an entertainingly malign pair of heavies, the oxymoronic Cherub mobsters, warn a detective off an assignment. The city sweats, a plague-like illness causing doctors to don the sinister beaks of old and paint red crosses on victims' doors. Dialogue veers between Cockney and private-dick American, but details are joyous: bright light on a hangover thrusts "white lances down ... optic strings"; "blackheads stuck out of his nose like peppercorns". The ending is dissatisfying for its refuge into non-realism.

While the running thread of the Flaneur character, wandering the streets with ominous purpose, is intriguing, it feels like a cop-out that most of the tales end in fantasy. The characters who wear a lapel carnation throughout also seem token, like the ubiquitous birthmarks in Cloud Atlas. We see the power balance of relationships: a student in the hip crowd allows an admirer on to the periphery of his life to bolster his own ego; a man strings his girlfriend along, despite being bored. But both these stories would have ended better without them returning to the common theme of the city's murderer or monster. Thompson should not be afraid of the ordinary, it is often the residence of the extraordinary.

Beginnings are far trickier for anyone who sits down to write a first novel. The opening sentence must strike a balance between the familiar and the unfamiliar; it must announce the arrival of an original voice, but without falling into the trap of sounding merely zany or obscure. Above all, the reader’s initial encounter with a novel must make them want to read on.

Take the opening of Sam Thompson’s compelling first novel, Communion Town. “Do you remember how you came to this city, Ulya?” a character asks, and immediately we are caught up in a fictional world where questions are always easier to come by than answers. This world is mapped out in 10 stories, each told from the perspective of a different character, who inhabit a city that could be London or New York were it not for the fact that its districts have dystopian names like Sludd’s Liberty and Twistgate.

At first sight these stories seem to be wholly detached from each other. As the book develops, however, sly sideways connections emerge, and we start to see the same events from different perspectives. In one story a young musician watches as someone is thrown out of a bar; 80 pages later, the scene has swung round 180 degrees, and we watch “Some skinny kid with a violin case… gawping” from the battered point of view of the person who has just been ejected.

Subtly and deftly, Thompson succeeds in capturing the experience of city life, in which most human contact never gets beyond curious glances, and individual stories are forever bouncing off each other.