The Show

A frighteningly focused man of many talents, passports and identities arrives at England's broken heart, a haunted midlands town that has collapsed to a black hole of dreams, only to find that this new territory is at least as strange and dangerous as he is. Attempting to locate a certain person and a certain artefact for his insistent client, he finds himself sinking in a quicksand twilight world of dead Lotharios, comatose sleeping beauties, Voodoo gangsters, masked adventurers, unlikely 1930s private eyes and violent chiaroscuro women-and this is Northhampton when it's still awake. Once the town closes its eyes there is another world entirely going on beneath the twitching lids, a world of glittering and sinister delirium much worse than any social or economic devastation. Welcome to the British nightmare, with its gorgeous flesh, its tinsel and its luminous light-entertainment monsters; it's hallucinatory austerity. Welcome to The Show.