A useful new word (and concept) I learned from the internet is “griefing.” Normally used to decribe a video game opponent who doesn’t play fair, a real-world griefer is someone who plays nasty tricks on other people, to the point of ruin, humiliation, or death, in the guise of “humor.” Recent noteworthy examples include a suburban mom who allegedly helped several teenagers invent a fake online persona they used to taunt a neighbor girl until she committed suicide. Then there’s the person or persons known as the Filipino Monkey, who nearly started World War 3 by playing a little radio-prank on an American warship in the Straits of Hormuz. Ha ha.
While modern technology certainly makes it easy and convenient to sociopathically destroy your fellow man for your own amusement, griefing has existed for as long as humans have harbored resentment. Take, for example, John Scogin: a court jester so famous that books about his merry jests and pranks remained popular for hundreds of years after his death. Among his mirthful tricks was the time he lured the aggressive, unpleasant beggars of Oxford into a church by promising a feast, then set the church on fire. The malevolent “joker” Scogin is a spectral presence in Nicola Barker’s huge and ambitious novel. He comes to represent another, even more famous trickster: the cloven-hooved one, the man downstairs, Beelzebub, the titular Darkmans itself.
So what does John Scogin have to do with the residents of modern-day Ashford, a dull English town of tract homes and theme restaurants at the end of the Channel Tunnel? Barker, in 838 pages, slowly and methodically lays it out for us. It appears that when the Chunnel was dug, large portions of Ashford’s priceless history (buildings, antiques) were dug up, plowed under, or misplaced. Beede, armchair scholar and hospital laundry manager, spent years fighting for Ashford’s past via petition and committee. But he was defeated. And he gave up. Or did he? He’s clearly up to something. But what?
Beede’s son Kane (note the character names, by the way) would love to know what the heck his boring old dad thinks he’s doing. Kane, as a drug dealer who sells pills passed to him by one of his father’s hospital laundry co-workers, knows more than a little about what a man looks like when he’s hiding something. So he starts poking around. But everything he finds makes him even more confused. Why is Beede arranging secret meetings with Kane’s vulgar, screechy ex-girlfriend Kelly? What’s the relationship between Beede and his strangely alluring foot doctor Elen, and why do they spend so much time together? And why is he secretly studying this weird old manuscript, written in funny old-fashioned language, about some long-dead jester?
Elen’s husband is a German man named Isidore. Dory (as he’s known) has fallen victim to a worsening series of episodes he can’t explain: forgetting who he is, abandoning his car on highway off-ramps, stealing horses, speaking archaic languages he never learned. Elen and Dory’s little boy, Fleet, if anything, is even stranger. With the steely calm that is the hallmark of all Creepy Clairvoyant Kids, Fleet has built a huge, precise replica of an ancient cathedral he’s never seen. And out of nowhere, he recounts, in hideous detail, the horrible jests of one John Scogin. And he has the same speaking-ancient-languages problem that his dad has. But he’s only six: how could he know all this stuff? What the Devil is going on in Ashford?