Maud Stearne is the solitary, ageing mistress of a crumbling mediaeval manor in the fens - a “witch’s lair in a fairytale” is how the first voice in the story, a reporter, describes it. At 69, Maud is under pressure to tell the story of how, years ago, her father came to kill someone - at the start we don’t know who - and the wider narrative is the story that she half-tells and half-watches unfold. We move from voices in the 1960s, through a third-person narrator of the crumbling mental health of the family and servants, and hear the voice of Maud herself, reflecting, recounting her growing into adulthood as the antagonist to her father’s plans and the agent of her increasing independence. To reveal much more of the complexities of the characters and their relationships would tarnish the final sections.

Themes Paver’s readers met in Dark Matter - solitude; a threatening supernatural presence forcing its way into a house; sexual obsession; past wrongs coming back to haunt the characters and the setting - are reexplored here in what is resolutely a nod to M R James. The medievalist father battles with his scholarly pursuit of a character Paver acknowledges has some connection with real-life mystic Margery Kempe and his feeling that a demon of the fens has been let loose and is coming for him. There are innocent young men - M R James might have admired Clem - and shadowy fen-dwellers, and the local saint is based on St Guthlac of Crowland. Right up my street, and more than enough to keep the reader on their toes.

The structure is deliberately demanding: which of the voices we hear are reliable? Even at the end, I am unsure quite who is telling the whole truth. Is the father’s notebook kept back from the police because it incriminates him - or because Maud’s father’s view of what was happening is somehow too awful to contemplate? Who is conniving with whom to conceal the truth about the father’s killing of a key member of the narrative? And behind the struggles to rule the everyday life of a big house on the eve of the first World War, there is a gnawing fear: How real are the things that terrify and how much are they conjured from imaginations sickened by past misdeeds?

There are odd stumbles in the language, where Paver perhaps doesn't quite get the tone right: is the father an historian as he says, or would he be called an antiquarian? Do we need the dialect in some characters to be so accentuated (“Don’t you nivver go near un,” says the Nurse, and I am reminded of Cold Comfort Farm)? Would the mediaeval mystic Alice Pyatt have talked the way she is represented? These are very minor issues, however: there is a good pace to the book, characters are appropriately mysterious, unlikeable, pitiable. The claustrophobia that envelops the house is tangible. The fen is a brilliant setting for all of this, and it is clear that its wildness - I thought of Roger Deakin’s farm, and Richard Mabey in his retreat to the fens - is something Maud fights to preserve, and how she manages and at what cost make for a gripping story in itself.