Wood effectively creates a manipulative, shitty ex-husband and self-centered absentee father in Francis Hardesty; the opening pages, where he arrives to collect Daniel for a road trip whose purpose is, for a while, unclear, cement his unreliability in our minds. I think the story of the Artifix was the hardest part for me to gel with in this dramatic and, finally, nail-biting novel. Daniel, cooped up in a car with his dad, just twelve years old and with no real understanding of the world is in a precarious position indeed. I wanted to know how it could fit, this story of a young boy who suffers an asthma attack in a forest and is rescued by alien who appears like a batty old women using alien words and cooking strange potions.

Tony and Susan: путешествие с папой, которое так неплохо начиналось и сулило двенадцатилетнему герою множество радостных событий, превращается в золотую жилу для психотерапевтов. Daniel is obsessed with the TV series, and it is only because of her son’s fixation with anything Artifex, that his mother, Kath, allows Fran to take Daniel on this trip to see the film-set and meet the actors. This book had a gripping first half; the build up to the major incident was packed with suspense and tight writing, and although slow moving, this rammed up the intensity and urged me to read on. For twenty years, Daniel Hardesty has borne the emotional scars of a childhood trauma which he is powerless to undo, which leaves him no peace.It’s 1995 when Kath is persuaded to let Fran take Daniel on a road trip to Leeds to see the set of a children’s series, Artifex, which Daniel loves. Francis is estranged from Daniel's mum, Kath, and works away a lot as a set designer/builder, currently working on popular children's show, The Artifex. We know that something bad is coming, we don’t know what and we don’t know how, we just have to strap in and follow along. The book is told from the point of view of twelve year old Daniel, who is on a road trip with his father, travelling north to visit a film set his father works at.

Full of drama and emotion, and a lot of bad behaviour, Daniel soon begins to realise that the end of the journey will not be what was promised but he is powerless to stop the wheels once they have been set in motion. Suffice to say that this is 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, 2015’s The Ecliptic. There’s a final section where we see Daniel as an adult, with a beloved partner, and realise that the book has been driving, all along, towards the question of whether he can bear to be a father, whether it is irresponsible for him to taint a child with the bloodline of a mass murderer.In the latter stages of the novel, Daniel is an adult, obsessively trying to reconstruct those dramatic events from memory, witness statements, and video evidence. This appears to suggest that the only way to avoid catastrophe is to endure a narrow, self-limiting existence, to keep one’s head down and play safe. I can't pretend to understand what all my parents arguments were about, or who was to blame for starting them. The first two thirds of this are a powerful depiction of the devastation caused when someone ‘flips their lid’.

Thanks to this series Daniel has formed a bond with his estranged father, and he's obsessed with it. T]he ground has been laid so thoroughly, motivations and personal dysfunctions so intricately established, that the shocking acts of violence seem perversely comprehensible. 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. Much of the novel is a road trip, with its climax set in the Lake District, highly appropriate backdrops. But Fran promised Daniel that he'd take him to Leeds, where he worked as a set carpenter on the children's TV series The Artifex, with which Daniel was obsessed.It starts slow, then hits you in the gut when the "incident" finally occurs, then drifts back into nothingness. There's a good book in there somewhere but the whole thing needs pruning and paring back for it to emerge. Fran is an incurable womanising opportunist that has managed to destroy his marriage to Kath and consequently has been absent for most of Daniel’s life. The book starts off like any family drama, a steady rise in tension showing the aftermath of a family break-up.

His first novel The Bellwether Revivals was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Book Prize, and won one of France's foremost literary awards, Le Prix du Roman Fnac. It unfolds with all the gravity of a factual story; so many of the details somehow have the sickening ring of truth about them. The prose is powerful and masterfully paced, the characters are real, and the author manages to bridge the gap between writing a harrowing thriller and a subtle inward-diving tale. 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 . Still, when I think about that August week and what transpired, I know it is the fault line under every step forward I try to make.Daniel is heading in the right direction away from his past, but he knows that his father could be within him. For the characters a nightmare, for the reader an exciting thriller, now slow, then accelerating, then again fading into a dreary hopeless irreversibility.