FOR 33 YEARS MR F has been trudging along the same route to work in the warren of ancient lanes near Cannon Street that, in 1967, when Bartlett’s chilling story unfolds, remained the hub of London's fur trade. Mr F, a furrier, is respected professionally, but a bit of a “cold fish”. He has “never invited anyone to share that single bed of his”.

Every evening Mr F scrubs the smell of pelts from his hands with carbolic. He cooks dinner, smokes a few rollies, has a cup of tea while listening to the radio and goes to bed. But then Mr F starts having a recurring dream, in which he discovers a young man’s naked corpse strung up in his bathroom.

He becomes tinged with morbid curiosity and begins inspecting men on his daily commute, looking to match dream and reality, and, like a tumour blooming into deadly life, terrible urges begin to dominate Mr F’s thoughts.

A theatre director and performer as well as a novelist, Bartlett is a storyteller well aware of how to exert control over his audience. He wastes little time before demonstrating that he can, in a moment, stop your heart, or break it; possibly even, you suspect, rip it out and show it to you. Skin Lane’s aspirations go beyond its distressingly effective shock tactics, however. Intertwining Mr F’s story with Beauty and the Beast — a favourite of this lonely man as a child — the reality of late1960s London becomes freighted with omens, symbols and interpretations more common to fairy tale than gritty city life And Bartlett goes still further, interweaving Mr F’s strange awakening with the redevelopment of the last remaining bombsites in the City and the Sexual Offences Act — which partially decriminalised sex between men — receiving Royal Assent. Skin Lanewelds itself to your hands from first to last. Textured, teeming with menace and, at the end, deeply moving, it is an extremely fine piece of writing.

SKIN LANE by Neil Bartlett

Serpent’s Tail, £10.99; 288pp £9.89 (free p&p) 0870 1608080 or buy here

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