Things are amiss in the Barton household. The ordinary trials of family-making have wrung all that was good from Joseph and Constance’s marriage. Nightly, his motions to tenderness are rebuffed, while, to her distress, she finds more of her father in her stolid husband with each passing day. Worse, their daughter Angelica, after at last being displaced from the conjugal bedroom at the ripe age of four, cries out in terror in the morning’s small hours, telling of unearthly torments. Yet what Joseph dismisses as a mollycoddled child’s brays for attention, Constance soon finds cause to believe. And so, impelled by maternal love, she resolves to defy her disbelieving spouse and take it upon herself to protect her beloved Angelica – no matter how grave the cost.

Ostensibly, Angelica seems a pastiche of the Victorian ghost story – and, for its first third, it’s just that. Arthur Phillips has an uncanny knack for the genre’s narrative rhythms and ornate vocabulary (‘It is feculent and sets the skin quite to creeping,’ exemplifies the plainest of his prose), as well as a keen familiarity with the stifling social mores and prevailing attitudes of the day. Comparisons to Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw have already abounded, and it’s a compliment Phillips deserves. Yet Angelica is more than just a thoroughly convincing homage. Phillips presents its murky events from four characters’ standpoints, each typically effacing core testimonies of the last. It’s soon obvious that supernatural intrigue will give way to the lush furnishing of fragile psyches, and Phillips proves a deep sensitivity to the quiet anguish and emotional vagaries which plague the isolated and misunderstood.

If mishandled, Angelica might have arrived deader than the spectres which may or may not beleaguer its titular tot. But Phillips nails it. In fact, I’m worried it has, at this early juncture, already spoiled me for fiction this year – it’s that good.

Gerard Elson is from Readings St Kilda