Touched review Joanna Briscoe's creepy tale of a house that harbours secrets

Children go missing from a cottage that resists renovation in a wonderfully claustrophobic horror

There is more than a touch of the Midwich Cuckoos about the village of Crowsley Beck, "20 miles from Piccadilly Circus, but a different world entirely". It is 1963, and the Crales, Douglas and Rowena, have just moved there, keen to bring up their five children where "pansies grew in baskets and the rooks cawed black across the green". But planned renovations of the cottage they have it turns out, rather underhandedly acquired from Douglas's mother are not progressing as they had hoped. Their "delightful designs for the breakfast nook" are being superseded by the fact that the cottage doesn't seem to want to be updated, shrieks and groans when the builders attack it with their hammers, oozes damp through newly laid tiles.

Douglas is mostly absent; Rowena presses on, despite the hot, stultifying summer. She ignores the quiet chattering she sometimes hears from distant corners of the house, explains away the small figures that keep flitting past the edges of her vision, the scent of perfume that drifts inexplicably by. The sadness, the "dull whine of discomfort", she feels when she is home is overlooked, as she busies herself with her children, from baby Caroline to Evangeline, the odd one, who insists on dressing in her grandmother's Victorian clothes, who has "rain for hair" and whose "dresses were the hue of shadowed walls".

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