Wood’s brutal exploration of toxic masculinity urges you on to the bloody climax and leaves you grateful for the palate-cleansing coda that offers a closing note of redemption. This is a well-written tale, which is full of foreboding, as you know from the beginning that something terrible is going to happen, and yet you can't help hope, like Daniel, that it will be averted. This is the heart of a beautifully constructed novel: a portrait of a bad man, a very real, familiar bad man.

Daniel tells us on the third page, “ I loved him, and it shames me that I loved him, though everything he claimed to feel for me was just an affectation or a gesture of persuasion. Elegant and disturbing … accomplished beautifully … highly suspenseful … a novel of expertly woven tension and frightening glimpses into the mind of the deranged other; a worthy successor to Wood’s excellent second novel, The Ecliptic . I was completely transfixed by the tender and atmospheric writing that belies the violence bubbling beneath the surface. It starts slow, then hits you in the gut when the "incident" finally occurs, then drifts back into nothingness. I enjoyed the first person narrative,looking back and admitting this may not be as things we're,but this is how I remember them.

I'm glad I didn't know what the "incident" was before I got to it (please, be careful when reading reviews), and that section was definitely the novel's strongest, even with how pointless and sad it seemed.

Dan listens to the cassette, read by Maxine, as they travel north towards the TV studio, where Dan’s been promised a look around the set and the chance to meet the stars. I didn’t have a lot of empathy for the characters, but the expectation of an inevitable shock waiting to pounce had me transfixed. Francis is also a liar, and Daniel, now narrating as an adult and who hoards VHS tapes of the show, warns the reader that the trip went badly (“when I think about that August week and what transpired, I know it is the fault line under every forward step I try to make”), but it takes a while for the reader to find out just how disastrous. More of this parallel wouldn’t have gone amiss: the point is that the show is about not just the line between reality and fantasy, but that between fantasy and insanity.A chilling study of male violence, framed by a horribly, almost unbearably, moving portrait of a dysfunctional father-son dynamic, it left me in bits. I liked the thrilling suspance throughout the Whole book and the comparison the narrator often makes between his father and himself is just to Worth reading. A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better came out two years ago and I’ve had his name on my ‘must read’ list since reading the review.

Wood takes the passing, shabby details of mundane landscapes and makes them jitter and throb with yearning and menace. Travelling well beyond his earlier fiction, Wood has produced a tour de force that marks his creative arrival. Daniel Jarrett (previously Hardesty) narrates the story in reflection, starting in 1995 as he is due to leave on a road trip with his estranged father, Francis (Fran) Hardesty. Contrary to expectations, he appears on time and they go, sticking the first part of the book "The Sorceress" in the cassette player. Daniel is a huge fan and this trip is not only a long overdue chance to spend time with his father but it’s also an opportunity to visit the set and meet the stars of his favourite TV programme as Francis works on the show and has promised him a guided tour.The back cover of my proof of this doesn’t give much away: merely the names and relationship of our two protagonists, Francis and Daniel Hardesty, father and son, and the promise of a road trip that ends in an explosion of violence, which continues to haunt Daniel twenty years after the fact. because the writing was good, the lack of the other 3 because it was like trying to walk through treacle, a sad slightly pointless plot, unlikeable characters.

This story runs parallel to Daniel’s and he uses it as a way to emotionally support himself at times when he is alone, sad or terrified. At the time, Daniel lived alone with his mother in a small village, Fran having been kicked out due to his lying and cheating. He lets us in on the arc of the story right away yet he still rachets up the tension and suspense so tightly that at times, it’s next to impossible to exhale. Hindsight makes it easy to link every problem in their marriage to my father, bur perhaps this is too simplistic a view to take -- because, despite what happened in the end, and all his cruelty, can it really be that he was responsible for each defective moment in their life together? The book starts off like any family drama, a steady rise in tension showing the aftermath of a family break-up.Seen through Dan's eyes, his father, Fran, at first seems merely unlikable and feckless but as the story progresses the character disintegrates and becomes terrifying.