Mark Z. Danielewski is best known for his House of Leaves, a typographically delirious horror novel about a manuscript written by a blind man describing a film which showed an impossible house. It seemed to exhaust a particular kind of postmodernism of footnotes, cryptography, metatexts, pop culture and more, yet remained at heart a story about grief. Tom’s Crossing is more immediately accessible, but it is every bit as clever and even more emotionally devastating.

The bulk of the action takes place over five days running up to Halloween in 1982, although with a preface, ‘Some of what happened before’, and a longer epilogue, ‘Some of what happened after’. The preface introduces Tom Gatestone, an endearing prankster (boys called Tom in American literature are a giveaway), who intervenes when a local tough is ragging on a slight, shy boy called Kalin March. For devilment, Tom challenges them both to join him in trying to ride the horses of a particularly intemperate man, Orwin ‘Old’ Porch, whose business is founded on slaughterhouses. Kalin has almost preternatural equestrian abilities and a friendship is formed.

Less than 40 pages in, Danielewski delivers the first of many sucker punches and sleights of hand. By the end of summer Tom dies of cancer. On his deathbed he makes Kalin swear a promise not to let Old Porch kill the horses they’ve been regularly riding, but to take them deep into the mountains into a sanctuary through the eponymous crossing. This Kalin does, accompanied, against his wishes, by Tom’s brattish adopted sister Landry and… Tom’s ghost. (The ontological status of Tom’s ghost – psychic compensation, split personality, genuine ghost? – goes through many iterations.) They are pursued relentlessly by Porch’s sons, who exhibit varying degrees of psychopathy, especially since the Porches and Gatestones have been locked in a feud since the foundation of their Utah hometown.

From the outset, the reader knows things are going to end very darkly indeed, and any summary can only scrape the surface of this majestic book. There is a narrator, whose identity is eventually revealed, and the story is being told many years after the events. This allows Danielewski to have a chorus of voices debating the choices, so that each action has a nimbus of hypotheticals. The tale of Kalin and Landry has inspired various artworks, songs and events, all detailed within the book, exploring different angles on the material.

On the first page, one is the work of ‘no great artist, and surely not up for no Homeric echoes’; but the novel is full of such echoes. It is an odyssey to a fabled new home, and the story of a ferocious conflict between families, the entitled and the aspiring, the faithful and the reprobate. There isa genuinely frightening descent into the underworld, and also hints of Dante, especially in a mountain-top theophany.

Though a western, and a supernatural one, it is also a crime novel. There are brutal passages, but the manner in which potential proofs emerge and are misfiled or misinterpreted keeps the reader trapped between expectation and disappointed hope. This is a monumental achievement.