In his mid-forties, Miles Krzelewski is a graduate student who makes Saul Bellow’s Herzog look like an academic overachiever. After 14 years and 11 changes of subject – including Rabelais’s monsters, Chekhov’s early humour and Tolstoy’s train journeys and farming techniques – he has yet to complete his doctoral thesis.

When his wife, Kate, a respected Milton and Blake scholar, is offered a one-year visiting professorship at a rural Vermont college, Miles is thrilled, convinced that a pastoral life will afford him the inspiration he needs for his latest project – a study of Russian peasant folklore. Together with their children, 12-year-old Wesley and nine-year-old Olive, plus their dog, Giuseppe, they undertake the long journey from their Californian home.

Country People is a disarmingly self-aware novel, complete with authorial foreshadowing and direct addresses to the reader.  It is therefore no surprise when Miles’s assertion that nothing ‘bad could happen from such lovely days’ is almost immediately belied. At first, the ‘simple city folk’ are merely jolted by the harsh realities of the Vermont countryside, among them a property sign reading: ‘Due to the price of bullets, warning shots will not be fired.’ Soon, however, Miles becomes entangled with the shadowy Jeremiah Wilkes Society, an association that has consequences for the entire family, not least the impressionable Olive.

Wilkes, a fictional 19th-century pastor, left a detailed account of his descent into a subterranean world: an underground Atlantis, home to a sophisticated civilisation. Wilkes Society members now debate the implications of his Colloquies, and search the surrounding forest for the fabled portal. Their ranks include Snowflake Bentley, named after a celebrated photographer whose spirit he believes has possessed him; Kayleigh Swan, Olive’s teacher, who patrols the Vermont border against interlopers from neighbouring Massachusetts; and Clem, a pest controller, who makes house calls dressed as a rat.

Daniel Mason’s prose, rich in wry observation, ensures that the darker elements of his plot never obscure its comic spirit. He deftly captures the hapless Miles and his repeated attempts to rationalise his predicament, while his skilful skewering of intellectual pretension, from a sociological study of ‘Can-Throwing Behaviour of Rural American Males’ to a third-grade production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with a chorus of ten Pucks, makes for a novel of rare delight.