There’s terror and turbulence in a run-down Wiltshire city. Posh people are stealing poor kids. There’s a devastating new drug about, fuelling weird rituals at secret parties. To top it all off, the Queen is coming to visit. This is the mess DCI Terry Balance has to pick his way through in Tariq Goddard’s High John The Conqueror, a highly unusual and successful hybrid of police procedural, folk horror and psychogeographic ramble set in the Brexit autumn of 2016.

Balance is himself an unusual hybrid. He’s a hipster cop, Down From London, escaping some unspecified trauma. To the locals he seems too well-tailored and suspiciously sophisticated: his ringtone is a Philip Glass tune, and at one point he compares a crook’s face to a Turner in the National. They all assume he’ll be on his way soon. He is a frustrated writer and recovering flaneur, partial to fantasy, seeing ‘interlinked regiments of association pouring into a single indissociable totality‘. That carry-on might fly in the land of Lud Heat, but in Wiltshire he has wisely decided to bend to the dominant reality of The Job. Most of the time, anyway. He has an interesting line on police as a job for pleasers, a trait he firmly self-ascribes, acknowledging his strong desires to solve and to appease. He has unresolved issues with his dead father. He lives in a deconsecrated Methodist chapel, converted in bland good taste. It suits him well enough, as he cloaks all his lapsed yearnings and meaning-quests behind fine flannels and a wall of Penguin Classics. He brings all of this motivated reasoning to the disappearance that kicks off the investigation.

Local teen Iggy Lockheart has vanished from his mouldy caravan in Auntie Eileen’s garden, where his only companions are a tank of unfortunate fish and a sock he manifests as Wonder Woman’s fist. He is the sixth young person to go missing from Hanging Hill, the rough end of town, and when his mum calls it in one drunken morning, Balance shows up with his no-bullshit partner DCI Tamla Sioux. Their dynamic is enjoyable, like a Wessex Mulder and Scully, as Sioux tolerates and punctures Balance’s yen for mystic connections. To her scorn, he falls hard for insightful and sensual Auntie Eileen, a ‘Palaeolithic warrior queen’ in raspberry leggings (for yoga) who turns the cops on to the dark energy of the neighbourhood (it’s the ley lines) and the sinister posho party scene that is hoovering up aimless local youth, first as wait staff, then as something altogether darker.

Working the case introduces the detectives to a cast of creepy eccentrics recognisable to anyone who grew up in or around a small country town (this is a city only on a technicality: a cutesy Cathedral Close off a dying high street does not make a metropolis). Oily pop-collectibles dealer Barry Swillcut is mixed up in it, like his upscale partner-in crime Breezy Fallgrief, whose higher-end antiques shop occupies the ancient bordello of the bishops and caters to the county’s wealth of rock royalty. A long-gone local space-rock outfit called Acid Horse, whose reputation for sexual deviance outlasted their obscure music, leads the detectives to one Mungo Masters. He was once the band’s punk impresario, while still a public school prefect, but these days he is a major financier and political donor. He is squire of Sebastopol House, the gargantuan pile where by all accounts the goings-on have been going on.

Masters is a bracing presence, a pugnacious aristo who considers himself a radical spirit untrammelled by the bougie conventions of embarrassment and shame that dog every other character lower down the ladder. Like everyone in the novel, he is after some sort of transcendence, but his obstacles are not powerlessness or poverty or unrealised potential. His problem is potence: stood alone in a gallery of ancestral portraits, he knows he will never transcend his lifetime. So he quotes Sid Vicious, reads old issues of Living Marxism, and listens to Wagner and Roxy Music’s ‘Avalon’ on his half-a-million-pound stereo, whose sleek fidelity is the only thing that arouses him. He holds those infamous Piers Gaveston-esque parties. He rages in his vast palace of ‘pagan ebullience’—contrasted neatly with Balance’s neutered and gentrified chapel—and he wants to make the gods angry.

There are many spirits to spar with. High John The Conqueror is an African-American folk hero: a slave whose spirit was never broken, a trickster and a shape-shifter, always pursued but never outwitted. High John also refers to a root associated with hoodoo ritual, name-checked by Muddy Waters as his second cousin ‘Little Johnny Concheroo’ in ‘Mannish Boy’ and ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’, in which he ties it with the black cat bone and the mojo bag as the sources of his unrivalled sexual power. Goddard invokes this folk aphrodisiac to satisfy his characters’ many lusts for transformation, their desires to transcend ‘gloomy vividity’. They might want to make meaning or feel euphoria, or simply to be relieved by love of the exhausting performance of living alone. One way or another, they all seek deliverance from their unitary selves to something greater.

Drugs might do it, sex might do it, love might do it, religion might do it, music might do it. The novel certainly has a lot of faith in music, as the naturally abstract art form that transports so easily. Masters calls it ‘the one entity that does not need the irritating intervention of words to explain what it is.’ There are many references to artists that flourished immediately after Sid’s year-zero, 1976—like 2016, a year of rage, royalty and flag-waving (this forty-year callback across the flat circle of time turns out to be very relevant to the secrets of High John). But there’s a sense that music, even the quixotic provincial canon Goddard’s references trace out (Iggy, The Cure, Orridge, Motown, Hawkwind, Siouxsie Sioux), promised a lot and hasn’t delivered. High John will deliver you, for sure, but only he knows where, and he wants something in return. How much you are willing to give up depends on how desperate you are, and that depends where you started out from.

In this story there are those who get to choose their lives, and those whose fates are chosen for them. The choosers are often nominatively determined—Masters, Balance, Grace—and signified with their taste in music, clothes and furniture. Barry Swillcut’s shop, Bizarre Bazaar, is a shrine to the untaken paths of these choosers. Its pop tchotchkes are bittersweet tokens of unrealised promise, the infinity-minus-one of young well-to-do potential. Balance feels this pang, seeing himself as a child of squandered gifts. By contrast Nick The Well, deadbeat landlord of grim rock flophouse the Purple Hearse (never go to the pub nearest the railway station) gets a similar experience from the mystery drug: ‘Word was… you might even be able to choose what kind of trip you had—maybe even making it your own, undoing mistakes and remaking a future in line with whatever you had wanted your life to be in the first place.’ The choosers get a pleasurable hauntological frissons from browsing the ephemera of their childhoods, toying with the past and its lost futures. The chosen-for need a much more radical reset: they want to erase their lives entirely.

Despair, then. That’s the thing. Goddard’s novel crackles with fury at the state of the town after less than a decade of austerity: the ten-times topsliced public services, the hollowed civic core, the pathetic deference to power and tradition, the willingness to sacrifice lives young and old to peripheral rot. Let the kid wank in the caravan, let doolally nana shit the bed in the back room, let the scum float away, who cares. This is one straightforward reading of the plot. Money and power, seen and unseen, have narrowed and emptied these characters’ lives of meaning, driving the young especially to such despair that they crave oblivion, they want to disappear. They know themselves to be expendable, they know no way out, so they rush for the void. Malign figures like Masters are happy to assist, for their own peculiar but ultimately irrelevant reasons. He might think he’s Lord Summerisle, but it doesn’t matter who he thinks he is. If it wasn’t him, it would be someone else. Whoever chooses to live in a place like Sebastopol House has directed their own fate, and passed through the mirror.

Goddard isn’t content to let this all fall into an overfamiliar shape, though. He resists both picturesque myth-retelling and the posho-politician-plod-paedo-ring plot that every procedural from Line Of Duty on down has been tempted by in the last decade. Ruling class lust has been the ruin of many a poor country boy and girl, as Matty Groves could tell you on one of those dusty Fairport Convention LPs that Barry hawks on his stall. But just like those old songs, the strength of Goddard’s story is that its stylising and mystical allusions are rooted in social and economic reality, and the class relationships that define life in the countryside and its towns.

Olympian forces have always directed the fates of the semi-rural un-rich. They simply evolve with the times. An Airbnb invasion dispossesses a village almost as effectively as a landowner’s act of enclosure or a valley-flooding reservoir or a tank battalion in search of target practice. The British countryside is an industrial landscape, defined and described by work and money. You don’t need to magick and wyrd the place up to make it compelling, and Goddard is alive to the risk of this becoming another sub-Wicker Man shocker. Indeed he uses Balance—his own Sergeant Howie—to explore his ambivalence about the increasingly settled tropes of folk horror, when the detective finds himself faintly embarrassed by the ‘tackiness’ of the climactic rite. Will Wiles picked apart the blokish cliches of London psychogeography in a similar way in Plume to great effect.

Goddard has said he was trying to make this a Wiltshire True Detective, but his achievement is less po-faced and more quotidian, and much stronger for it. He has made a novel as angry and impressively real as it is fantastical and strange. His characters may approach the loquaciousness of an early Coen brothers movie, but Goddard’s town is less glossily stylised than Matthew McConaughey’s Louisiana. By pitching its spiritual core into a grim but resolutely recognisable and detailed world, it has more in common with Jonathan Meades’s Pompey, David Seabrook’s Broadstairs, or even Gordon Burn’s Gloucester. Like the man almost said, you don’t need to be wyrd to be weird. And after all, ley lines are for townies.