Can you imagine a world in which humans are allergic to each other? Not just in the current sense (getting furiously annoyed on social media, say) but physically being unable to come into any kind of contact with another person because to do so might kill you?

It’s actually a tough ask. Liam Brown has had a valiant effort at doing the work for us – but as his novel Skin demonstrates, doing anything at all under such circumstances other than staying at home or dying immediately, becomes highly convoluted.

Initially, that complexity is part of the novel’s appeal. Brown has fun describing a world in which his characters live in quarantine, communicating via computer screens. People have even less idea about what is real and what is Photoshop than we do, because they have no chance of getting outside to see for themselves. Brown’s post-apocalyptic nightmare is a fun way of exploring ideas about atomisation and the corrupting influence of social media.

Those few who do get to go outside have to dress up in protective suits, go through complicated decontamination routines, walk along prescribed and very short routes for limited amounts of time and with specific purposes. Brown’s narrator, Angela, is lucky enough to get a job surveilling a small bit of ground near her home as part of a “neighbourhood watch” scheme. But her life is claustrophobic and limited; small wonder that the government issues a cocktail of antidepressant medications alongside the vacuum-packed food parcels they despatch to survivors.

But it’s also here that the premise begins to break down. There seems to be a functioning industrial complex out in this post-apocalyptic world – but no one in the main narrative is either able or allowed to leave the house for any amount of time. So: who is wrapping up the food? Who is growing it? Can it all be done by robots? And if it is, who built the robots?

I was similarly confused about how the government was operating. We’re given some vague answers in a series of flashbacks about the initial outbreak of the unspecified virus that has made skin-to-skin contact lethal. Angela and her family survived while trigger-happy soldiers restored a kind of order. But Brown, perhaps wisely, doesn’t give many details about how some people are able to be out policing the streets, raiding homes and applying the law very physically when everyone else is stuck inside.

Also: if it was a virus, and everyone either died or retreated into quarantine, why didn’t the virus just die out? This idea is briefly broached late on in the narrative, where it comes as a kind of revelation to Angela – but surely this is one of the things everyone would be considering?

But if you can keep such questions down and suspend your disbelief long enough, there are rewards to be had in Skin. Brown’s prose is light and clear and always highly readable. I began to feel real sympathy both for Angela and her teenage daughter, Amber, who has to grow up simultaneously in isolation and with her whole emotional life smeared across social media.

But more and more problems also began to crop up. Angela meets someone who is able to wander around outside without any kind of suit on. “If he did turn out to be immune, the government would be able to use him as a vaccine,” she thinks. But then she just kind of shrugs. “I kept Jazz all to myself. I guess, if I’m honest, I felt possessive of him.” And we don’t get much more than that. No matter that she could have saved her family, herself and her world. In the absence of plausible reasoning, we can only assume that the real reason she didn’t turn Jazz in is that Brown didn’t want to end the book on page 50.

It’s almost a shame that he didn’t cut things short, because as Skin goes on, the implausibilities turn into absurdities, then tip over into inadvertent comedy. One climactic scene has Angela fleeing from her husband’s virtual reality schlong and we have to deal with this description: “As long and thick as my arm, it twitched menacingly in my direction, its tip glistening with a foul-looking fluid.” Yikes! It’s the most evil penis since Zardoz, and it isn’t even the daftest thing in the final chapters. But at least such silliness is entertaining. I may have lost faith in the book but I was never bored. If you’re looking for entertainment, you could do far worse.

Next time: Please Read This Leaflet Carefully by Karen Havelin