Winterwood
by Patrick McCabe
Bloomsbury ₤12.99, 256 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤10.39

Is it possible to understand a child-killer? Can this kind of sympathy lead us to an inappropriate empathy with evil, and further, to a worrying identification with that which we most hate and fear? From Frankenstein’s monster to Humbert Humbert, these questions are central to the writing of the outcast and of evil. But Patrick McCabe, in his latest novel Winterwood, neither asks nor answers any of them. Instead, he takes us down a road of dark connections.

Redmond Hatch is blessed with a fortunate life, a loving young wife and an angelic baby daughter. On a return visit to his home in the Irish mountains, he befriends a local man. “Auld Pappie Strange” is an old fiddler, loved by local families, who entrust their young to him so that they don’t lose touch with the traditions of the past.

After this meeting, Redmond’s family life is slowly eroded - a move to London is followed by unemployment, infidelity and divorce. As the life he has known crumbles around him, Redmond finds that Strange, who has committed suicide after being convicted for the abduction and murder of a child, enters his dreams, his waking moments, even his memories.

Redmond’s life shatters, literally and metaphorically, into layers and lies. He fakes his death and spies on his wife and her new partner. He then kidnaps his daughter and takes her to one of their favourite places, a wood where they play with My Little Pony, even though by now the child prefers to watch Sweet Valley High. Reinventing himself as Dominic Tierney, Redmond finds a job as a film producer and remarries a “sophisticated lady about town”. Eventually, he wins an award for a documentary he makes about life in the Irish mountains. It seems that Redmond has good fortune - and we never find out what happens to his daughter in the forest.

Winterwood is a horror story that uses well the idea of “doubling”. It is never clear how literal the similarities between Redmond and Strange are meant to be; at one point Redmond is told that his surname is a Celtic word for “strange”. This is a novel that both requires and resists interpretation - but as frustrating as this may sound, the effect is successful. Like the best horror writing, the nature of representation is central; whether it be evil, truth, or even Ireland and the Irish.

One striking similarity between Redmond and Pappie Strange is that they are both canny when it comes to playing to type: jilted husband, fiddler of olden times, adoring father, possible murderer. Only in the film-maker narrative do the cracks begin to show. McCabe deftly moves around this confused world where old Ireland races through the 1990s into the lifestyle-driven present day. Stereotypes are played with and sociopaths take advantage of parents who idealise Ireland’s past.

McCabe’s playfulness gives this novel a purity of feeling found only in the best gothic horror. It is impossible to tell what is real and what is imagined, what is comic and disturbing. At certain points the novel reads like a lugubrious delusion. As with his Booker-shortlisted novel The Butcher Boy, McCabe makes the unreliability of a narrator into a literary feature and an aspect of the uncanny.

The same is true of the reliable narrator who appears at the end of the novel and who calls the good fortune of Tierney a “tall tale indeed, a fanciful yarn and make no mistake”. The only problem is that the revelation on the final page turns any assurances upside-down.