Winterwood by Patrick McCabe

The roots of this dark forest twist Irish mythology into ugly shapes

Outsiders and fantasists, Patrick McCabe's protagonists spout a stream of consciousness that's more like a torrent. Redmond Hatch is the latest in McCabe's line of unreliable narrators, whose imploding worlds involve violence, child abuse and murder. In the eerie and unsettling Winterwood, snatches of ballads and repeated images - snow on pine trees, the sickly spearmint smell around a factory - make the divide between the real and imagined more uncertain.

We do know that, after years away, in the Eighties Hatch returned home to the mountains of Slievenageeha to write about a changing Ireland. He interviewed local good-old-boy Ned Strange. With his fiddle and folk tales, "Auld Pappie" seems to represent everything that the prosperous new Ireland is in danger of losing. But there's menace in his manner.

We know also that Hatch married Catherine, with whom he had a daughter, Imogen. Hatch remembers their life in London as blissful, although all was not well. When the marriage failed, Hatch followed his estranged family to Dublin. Stressed and often drunk, Hatch is haunted by Strange, who has hanged himself in prison after sexually assaulting and murdering a small boy.

While the tone at the beginning is misleadingly normal, Winterwood soon morphs into a macabre mix of repressed memories and madman's delusions. McCabe's fine talent for catching strong idiosyncratic voices gives the disturbing narrative an almost comic chattiness.

Like Strange, Hatch is a red-headed throwback. The men look interchangeable, indeed are interchangeable. By the novel's end, Red and Ned have fused. So too have Hatch and the boy who was murdered.

Back in Ireland, Hatch takes a new name, wife and job. He abducts his daughter, keeping her "safe" among the secluded pines of "winterwood" (the imaginary kingdom of My Little Pony). Later, Catherine suffers the same fate so that their "happy home" remains "unspoiled".

Poverty, sectarian violence and the Troubles have featured in McCabe's previous books. Now he shows us an Ireland rapidly modernising but still sentimentally mythologising its past. As in much of his work, popular songs echo throughout, and as the story progresses their romantic refrains become increasingly sinister. Avowals of eternal constancy strike an alarming note in the context of deranged, stalking ex-husbands and sexually predatory ghosts.