Darkmans

Author(s): Nicola Barker

Location(s): Ashford

Genre(s): Fiction

Era(s): Modern

Hauntings. History. Hysteria. In this uproarious contemporary ghost story, the medieval past takes on a human face and roams the backstreets and bypasses of 21st-Century Ashford, bringing chaos to the lives of all those it touches. No one is safe: not tight, upstanding Beede, nor Kane (his laid-back, drug dealing son), who share a home together but have nothing else in common—bar a mutual obsession with the same woman. This is Elen, an enigmatic chiropodist, whose unstable husband, Dory, believes that their only son, Fleet, has been fathered by the deranged ghost of an evil, 500-year-old court-jester.

DARKMANS conjures up a magical yet somehow instantly familiar world in which language crackles like static—twitching with barely containable energy. Past and present mingle and blur, and the lines between fantasy and reality, sanity and madness are continually rubbed out and redrawn… but by whose hand?

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