A lingeringly strange atmosphere hangs about Benjamin Wood’s third novel, in which the settings and paraphernalia of a new wave of British weird fiction — old children’s TV series, rustic bloodletting, the starkness of the northern landscape — encroach steadily on a retrospective story of childhood murder and deceit.
The setting is northern England in the early 1990s, as the young Daniel Hardesty, a bookish 12-year-old, embarks on a road trip to Yorkshire with his estranged dad Francis, a jobbing stage carpenter, philanderer and liar. They’re on their way to the set of The Artifex, the sci-fi TV drama on which Francis works and with which his son is obsessed. Fictional, of Wood’s own creation, and with fragments interspersed throughout the text, the series comes across as a weird-science British crossbreed of Catweazle and The X-Files.
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