There is more than a touch of the Midwich Cuckoos about the village of Crowsley Beck, "20 miles from Piccadilly Circus, but a different world entirely". It is 1963, and the Crales, Douglas and Rowena, have just moved there, keen to bring up their five children where "pansies grew in baskets and the rooks cawed black across the green". But planned renovations of the cottage they have – it turns out, rather underhandedly – acquired from Douglas's mother are not progressing as they had hoped. Their "delightful designs for the breakfast nook" are being superseded by the fact that the cottage doesn't seem to want to be updated, shrieks and groans when the builders attack it with their hammers, oozes damp through newly laid tiles.
Douglas is mostly absent; Rowena presses on, despite the hot, stultifying summer. She ignores the quiet chattering she sometimes hears from distant corners of the house, explains away the small figures that keep flitting past the edges of her vision, the scent of perfume that drifts inexplicably by. The sadness, the "dull whine of discomfort", she feels when she is home is overlooked, as she busies herself with her children, from baby Caroline to Evangeline, the odd one, who insists on dressing in her grandmother's Victorian clothes, who has "rain for hair" and whose "dresses were the hue of shadowed walls".
As Crowsley Beck swelters in the heat, Briscoe slowly entwines Rowena in a claustrophobic net of whispers and guilt and danger. There are real-world perils here, too, the menace of something not-quite-right in this picture-perfect village. And then Rowena realises that Evangeline, always prone to wandering, hasn't been seen for days, and Jennifer, "doll-beautiful", also appears to be missing.
Joanna Briscoe's Touched is the latest novel from the Hammer imprint, which has been asking acclaimed authors from Jeanette Winterson to Helen Dunmore to add a touch of horror to their writing. Briscoe, who wrote, brilliantly, about sexual obsession in her thriller Sleep With Me, shows she is equally at home with the spice of the paranormal. "It was there that all the shadows of these crooked cottages condensed, congealed even," she writes of the room where old Mrs Crale had slept. And: "There was a drift of perfume over the mould, that same taste of women's scent settling on her tongue. It nagged at her. She almost knew what it was. The crying wrinkled features flashed at her." It's all wonderfully creepy.
Briscoe writes at the end of Touched that she herself grew up in "the village of the damned" – Letchmore Heath in Hertfordshire, the location for the 1960 film that was based on John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos. She marshals all the tricks and trappings of the ghost story, from faces at windows to walls that moan, for her own Crowsley Beck. There are slightly too many mentions of half-seen figures flitting around – and would a self-respecting ghost really be so obvious as to waft the scent of Je Reviens around the place? But by and large, Touched is thoroughly eerie, an enjoyably chilling sliver of ice on a hot summer's day. And the real-world horrors it touches upon are perhaps even more disturbing than the otherworldly.
