Note: I’ve avoided including spoilers as far as possible, but inevitably some details from ‘The Sleepwalkers’ are discussed here.

I’m not certain exactly what this says about me, but were a situation to arise in which I’m held at gunpoint by a crazed Year Zero Literary Terrorist and told that they were about to press a magic button which will wipe every novel published in the twenty first century out of existence except for the work of three authors I’m allowed to save, I’ve already prepared for the scenario and have my answer ready. Perhaps I should get out more. Take up a hobby. Anyway, I choose David Mitchell, Jonathan Coe and Scarlett Thomas. And if even that isn’t enough to satisfy the demands of the Great Purge and I’m to be allowed only one then, though it would break my heart to lose the other two, I would save the work of Scarlett Thomas.

All of which is a lengthy way of prefacing what I’m writing here with the proviso that this isn’t really a review in the true sense since I’m not writing in any way objectively. Scarlett Thomas is, simply, my favourite contemporary author and I’m writing here not as a critic, nor as an #influencer – since I have zero influence over anyone – and certainly not as an academic, but as a fan, unashamedly and absolutely, as I always seem to when I’m writing about books or films or TV.

Like a lot of readers, my first encounter with Thomas was reading her extraordinary novel The End of Mr Y – still her only excursion into massive bestseller territory rather than cult appreciation – which impressed me so much with its quicksilver intelligence, its wild imagination and its mouse god Apollo Smintheus that, back in the days when there was room for choice and experimentation on the syllabus, I immediately started teaching it to A Level Literature students in a kind of postmodern metafiction duet with Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective. I’d come to the Mr Y party a little late, however, which meant that by the time I had read it, her next novel Our Tragic Universe was already available. While sharing the philosophical ambition of its predecessor, it was much quieter and less showy and yet I found it if anything an even more revelatory reading experience. The novel works extremely hard to give the impression – wrongly of course – of being almost entirely plotless, as untidy and messy as life itself, ‘the storyless story’ as Meg, the central character says. The characters drift around, think, walk, work, eat and talk – about tragedy, about the Beast of Bodmin, about obscure mathematical theories regarding the end of the universe. And yet, in some mysterious way that even here and now I can’t explain quite clearly, I had rarely read anything more moving, more truthful, more profoundly warm and compassionate, more gripping – in exactly the kind of pageturning way that a much more conventional piece of storytelling is gripping – or anything that had spoken to me more directly. If my earlier thought experiment Literary Extinctionist were to press me even further so that I could only save a single twenty first century novel it would be this one I think. After that I delved backwards, first to the wonderful PopCo, which again displayed Thomas’s unique capacity for combining wildly disparate ideas – in this instance cryptoanalysis, late stage capitalism and mathematics – into a compelling narrative, and then to the remarkably prescient Bright Young Things and the surprisingly joyous quest narrative Going Out. Later, when her next novel The Seed Collectors was published – a strange, funny and troubling work which addresses biology, botany and sexuality – I found it every bit as powerful as its predecessors, particularly in the way it moves away from the vivid first person narratives of PopCo, The End of Mr Y and Our Tragic Universe to a brilliantly achieved free indirect approach which even, rather beautifully, occasionally incorporates the voice of a kind of Chaucerian robin into its narrative perspectives. A bit later, I loved the pitch-black humour of the more slender, equally dark and subversive but ultimately kind Oligarchy. More recently still, I found the autobiographical 41-Love every bit as powerful and moving as her fiction.

With all that said, however, when advance publicity suggested that Thomas’s new novel, The Sleepwalkers, was a ‘sublimely creepy’ excursion into the Gothic I at once felt almost as much trepidation as excitement. Of course, there’s a long tradition of established literary novelists successfully trying their hand at a chiller, going back to Dickens and James (Henry, not M.R.) and right up to someone like Sarah Waters and The Little Stranger, but – and I’m mentioning no names or titles, you can guess at those for yourselves – I can also think of plenty of examples that just don’t work for me at all, smacking as they do of a literary gent or lady slumming it for a while. With their tendency either to deploy gothic conventions ‘ironically’ (because we all know we’re above this sort of thing really) or to attempt so much subtlety and restraint that they shy away from the genre altogether, I find those kind of books much harder to accept than even a very poor novel from someone who is happy to unpretentiously commit themselves to genre fiction. After all, ‘sublimely creepy Gothic’ is pretty much my happy place – as you’ll know if you’ve read, well, anything I’ve ever written really – and so my favourite modern writer of literary fiction taking a trip into the territory of the dark imagination was immediately setting up the kind of expectation levels that carry at least as much potential for disappointment as enjoyment. Were she to write something I found myself not liking all that much in a genre I’m less personally absorbed by, a historical novel, say, or a detective story, I could simply shrug my shoulders and wait for her next one. But a gothic novel that I didn’t enjoy from my favourite writer would be something which, being me, I wouldn’t find so easy to forgive and forget.

I needn’t have worried. The Sleepwalkers is, quite simply, as good a novel as I have read in many years. Utterly absorbing, genuinely unsettling, I devoured it greedily in a single sitting – something I don’t often do, though the same happened when I read Our Tragic Universe and 41-Love – and immediately found myself turning back to page one and reading it again. It’s a novel that repays that kind of devotion, since a first reading feels a little like standing on shifting sands – perhaps on a Greek beach that a storm is about to take away – unable to find a secure footing anywhere. Its sheer narrative tricksiness is such that the reader is constantly uncertain and insecure, forever worrying that they may be missing something significant right up until the devastating conclusion. I’m not sure if ‘tricksiness’ is the recognised critical term but I can’t find a better way of describing the novel’s combination of different, possibly unreliable narrators, its mosaic of – also possibly unreliable – documents and its vivid sense of the past blurring with the present. A rapid second reading is a way of beginning to fully appreciate just how skilfully the puzzle is fitted together.

If one of my concerns before reading The Sleepwalkers was the idea of the literary writer dabbling tentatively in the genre I love, like a kind of gothic tourist, I shouldn’t have been so foolish. Despite its modern day Greek island setting (‘Hot Gothic’ is Thomas’s own tongue in cheek label), the novel, while not really a horror story, is full-blooded enough to satisfy the most ardent devotee of gothic fiction. For one thing, at the heart of Thomas’s novel is a menaced honeymooning couple – a gothic trope I wrote about in Dracula, Frankenstein and Friends in relation to classic horror films like Kiss of the Vampire, The Black Cat and White Zombie. Evie and Richard, however, are a fascinating variation on the theme. From the very beginning they are a couple assailed by forces which they can neither control nor immediately understand – the classical form of the convention – but where more typically there is a sense of the couple’s essential innocence coming under threat from a dark sexuality embodied in the villains – Dr Ravna, Hjalmar Poelzig and ‘Murder’ Legendre in the films I’ve just mentioned – Evie and Richard are in a way threatened almost as much by dark forces from their own past as they are by the novel’s villains (if that word isn’t too reductive), forces from within themselves, even if the root of that threat remains a troubling version of sexuality and desire. This in itself leads into the way in which The Sleepwalkers engages with another of the gothic’s central conventions, the intrusion of the past into the present. Evie and Richard are both reeling from the impact of a something which was revealed at their wedding, a dark secret from their past they are both now doing their best to ignore and avoid discussing but which hangs like a black cloud over their relationship. To add a further layer of complexity to the novel’s sense of a past which is constantly threatening to erupt dangerously into the present, we are introduced to the story of another married couple who had stayed at the hotel a year before, and had apparently drowned in tragic circumstances – the sleepwalkers of the novel’s title – with Thomas for a time allowing the reader to wonder whether we are seeing a strange repetition of events from this story, as though Evie and Richard were re-enacting the scenario – as they quite literally and consciously do at one point in the novel – in a kind of time loop. Then, of course, there’s the Villa Rosa itself, the novel’s main setting, which, if it isn’t quite the House of Usher, Bly Manor, the Bates Motel or Hill House, is certainly creepily unsettling enough to take its place proudly alongside them, presided over by the mysterious – and somewhat vampiric – Isabella. Like every great gothic house, the Villa Rosa is a place of mystery and dark secrets. Paintings inexplicably disappear from the walls, notes vanish without explanation, and a vivid sense of threat almost but not quite coalescing into focus pervades its rooms and corridors. Isabella herself carries a sense of indefinable menace as she flirts with Richard and displays a hostility bordering on contempt towards Evie – though it is a menace which becomes less indefinable and more overt as the true darkness at the heart of the novel and of the Villa Rosa begins to be revealed. And, like every true gothic tale, this is a story of murder and power and dark desire.

None of this should have surprised me of course, not if I’d thought about Thomas’s earlier work a bit more carefully. The End of Mr Y is, after all, at its heart a novel about a cursed book. Oligarchy is, in a way, a gothic murder story in a haunted house, even if the house happens to be a boarding school full of teenage girls with eating disorders. And The Seed Collectors is, in part, a novel about the turbulent mysteries of sex and desire. Even her tennis memoir 41-Love, with a remarkable capacity for searing honesty, is a darkly funny tale of obsession and breakdown and hysteria, almost gothic in its account of emotional turmoil.

What is most immediately striking about The Sleepwalkers, of course, beyond its embrace of thrillerish and gothic conventions, is Thomas’s decision to tell her story in the form of a series of documents, some incomplete or unfinished, some difficult to immediately decipher the full meaning of. It’s not perhaps quite as radical a formal decision as it might first appear in a novel which lives, however unusually, in the Gothic world. The epistolary novel was a dominant form at the time the novel itself was born in Britain – perhaps stemming from an eighteenth century uncertainty around the whole idea of what a novel was or could be. Writers like Richardson, Cleland and Smollett deployed the epistolary form as a simple way of skirting around the apparently unanswerable question ‘who is saying this?’ raised by what we would now think of as a more conventional third person narrative and offering a pretence of verisimilitude in its place. The flaws in the method – which itself raised less theoretical but more practical questions such as ‘why are you still writing in your diary while the dastardly duke is creeping into your bed?’ – were soon seized on and parodied mercilessly by Fielding and, less directly, by Sterne and the epistolary form rather fell out of fashion. Except, as the eighteenth century crept into the nineteenth, at the more disreputable end of the market. In the Gothic novel, always teetering thrillingly on the edge of disbelief and absurdity, the device continued to lend a welcome counterbalance of apparent authenticity – as in Frankenstein where Victor’s fantastical story is relayed to us through the letters of a ship’s captain trapped in the Arctic ice to his sister – or in its close cousin, what came to be known as ‘sensation fiction’ the best exponent of which was Wilkie Collins, whose The Woman in White and The Moonstone reinvigorated the form and were certainly a key influence on what it will surprise absolutely no-one to learn remains for me the greatest of all novels to use the epistolary form, the castle to which all gothic roads must eventually lead, Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Thomas’s use of the form is particularly ingenious – or devious, depending on your point of view – because not only do we have the two long letters from the differing perspectives of Evie and Richard that form the first half of the novel, each calling the other’s interpretation of events into some question, but we also have a growing sense that the other documents may themselves be unreliable, partial, incomplete, tampered with or – as a close comparison of the contents page with the text itself will show – missing entirely. The issue of the document’s own unreliability is brought into fullest focus with the absurd comedy – at a moment of high drama – of an uncorrected transcript of an audio recording, forcing the reader to struggle to piece together what may actually have been said rather than what has been transcribed. At another point, some crucial and awful truths from Evie’s past are revealed to us in the form of notes for a one act play she is outlining, as a fictionalised version of reality.

We begin though with a long letter which Evie is writing to Richard, offering her explanation of why she is leaving him. As Evie’s apparently matter of fact, clear-sighted account unfolds, the reader experiences a growing unease, a vague, ill-defined sense that something is very wrong here. Outside of the horror genre, I can rarely remember feeling quite such a sense of mounting dread – a sense that, somewhere just beyond the frame, just out of sight, awful things are at work. The comparisons I’ve seen made so far – Highsmith, Du Maurier, even ‘a darker, funnier White Lotus‘ – while all being valid to a point (especially the Du Maurier of her short story Not after Midnight) – only go so far. There’s something of the same feeling of disquiet, of darkness hovering just around the edges of what is being described, in John Darnielle’s Universal Harvester, but it is even more fully achieved and sustained in The Sleepwalkers. In fact the most meaningful comparison in my mind as I was reading was with David Lynch’s film Lost Highway. Lynch’s film conjures a similar sense of foreboding and dread in its opening half hour, exploring, like Thomas, a dysfunctional marriage apparently on the point of collapse. With its story of a series of mysterious videotapes which arrive anonymously on their doorstep and show, progressively, the outside of their house, then the inside, then the couple themselves sleeping, Lost Highway also raises a number of the same questions surrounding reliability, subjectivity and reality as The Sleepwalkers, its central character Fred Madison even reflecting directly upon it at one point when he says ‘I like to remember things my own way…How I remember them. Not necessarily the way they happened.’ The repeatedly referenced mystery about what happened ‘that night’ in Lost Highway works rather like the secret revealed at their wedding which Evie and Richard avoid discussing, although Lynch being Lynch, Lost Highway’s mystery is never explained while Thomas does eventually allow the awful truth to emerge. I did wonder for a time whether Thomas, like Lynch, might withhold the answer – and it’s an intriguing thought as to how the novel might be different if it had simply remained in that unresolved tension throughout – but when the moment of terrible realisation does come in The Sleepwalkers it allows for a deepening exploration of the novel’s themes of control, manipulation and the abuse of power. Again, both novel and film share an interest in time’s complexity – in Lost Highway linear time is explicitly fractured and dangerously out of control, while in The Sleepwalkers the parallel and overlapping stories of the two couples for a time raise the possibility of an odd kind of echo or slippage. Lynch’s narrative involves a quite literal loss of identity as Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) simply becomes Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty) without rational explanation, and while Thomas’s novel remains essentially a realist one, there is a comparable sense of characters whose sense of self is vulnerable and under assault. Evie does have a literal alter-ego in the form of Hannah, a character she once created as a writer and actor and whose identity she adopts, but at one point in the novel it wouldn’t have entirely surprised me had she undergone a full-blown Lynchian transformation into Claire Kearney, the sleepwalker from the year before. Even Lynch’s love of nameless figures who function more like abstract ideas than characters – Lost Highway’s Mystery Man, The Little Man From Another Place in Twin Peaks – has a distant echo in The Sleepwalkers genuinely sinister Dapper Little Man.

The Evie who emerges as her letter goes on raises one further issue relating to Thomas’s approach – the idea of ‘likeability.’ Characters being unsympathetic or insufficiently likeable is a common complaint from readers who don’t enjoy Thomas’s work – I’ve even, rather worryingly, seen the same complaint applied to her memoir. For me it’s the most irritatingly wrong-headed criticism imaginable. It doesn’t matter in the slightest whether we ‘like’ our fictional characters, it matters whether we care about them. Evie is self-absorbed, demanding, even narcissistic. Ariel Manto in The End of Mr Y has sex in a toilet for money. Meg in Our Tragic Universe is drifting without purpose. The Scarlett Thomas of 41-Love is obsessive to the point of neurosis. I’ve cared very deeply about all of them. They are all, also, in different ways, sharp, funny and ferociously intelligent. What’s not to like? Thomas’s characters make bad choices and do the wrong thing a lot of the time. They are messy, flawed, fucked up. But the point is so am I. And so are you. Because that’s what being human means. Really human, that is, not the ‘likeable’ version that is only likeable because they’re shown ‘saving the cat’ in the first ten minutes of the screenplay.

The demand for likeability in our fictional characters, it seems to me, is just another facet of the contemporary desire to judge and dismiss. We want things simple and clear cut, to avoid the difficult work of thinking about nuance and complexity, and if we don’t get it then it’s ‘problematic’ and cancellable, it’s ‘accountability’ and #nodebate and Twitter pile ons. Evie herself, we discover, has been on the receiving end of this kind of treatment. But one of the most remarkable and welcome features of Thomas’s work is an absolute insistence on nuance and complexity and with it a refusal to make absolute judgements. Her characters at times do things they should not, occasionally appalling things, and they bear the responsibility for what they do, but there are no heroes and villains in her work, even in The Sleepwalkers which approaches being the kind of genre fiction where we might expect heroes and villains to live.

Instead, there is only compassion.

Compassion for Evie – who I for one found myself liking very much – but compassion also for Richard, pompous, blinkered Richard who is much harder to ‘like’, who ‘accidentally’ sleeps with Isabella, and, as we eventually find out, has ‘accidentally’ done much worse. There’s even a degree of compassion for the villainous Isabella herself – established as a source of threat from the outset, with Evie telling us:

Isabella. I find it so hard to write her name. But you have to face the things you fear, so here it is again: Isabella. Isabella. Isabella. But of course if I start with her, it’s already over, and the dogs have won, and we are now just piles of bones.

Yet the novel asks us to reflect on the forces that have led Isabella to this point, to think about the shadowy figures who stand behind her.

That, in the end, is the keynote of The Sleepwalkers, and of Thomas’s work more generally. For all the sparkling inventiveness of her imagination, for all the crystal precision of her language, the bedrock of her writing is kindness. Not the #BeKind variety, which tends to evidence its commitment to compassion in terms of rape and death threats towards anyone with a different viewpoint, but a real, deeply felt and humane kindness.

That’s quite a gift to offer to the world. I wish there were more of it.

So, if you only read one book this year then … then what’s the matter with you? Read more books! But if you absolutely insist on this entirely arbitrary and ill-considered restriction and will only be reading one novel this year, make it The Sleepwalkers. I can’t imagine there’ll be a better one along for quite some time.