‘I paint the things hidden behind things,’ says the mysterious and unsettling artist in Marcel Carné’s 1938 film Le Quai des brumes. Writer David Keenan has pursued a similar course. His first book, England’s Hidden Reverse (2003), was a history of the occult-tinged industrial music scene, while Monument Maker (2021), his fifth novel, featured a group of psychogeographers dedicated to exploring underground spaces and a character who inhabits the dark side of the moon. In Boyhood, Keenan’s seventh novel, a young Glaswegian woman visiting a French cathedral believes she has stumbled on ‘the certain gate of heaven’. ‘Within the cathedral itself there is a secret cathedral,’ she reflects. ‘It has begun to reveal itself.’ 

The book’s protagonist is Aaron Murray, a first-year student at the University of Glasgow in 1988. He has a mentor known as The Precious Gift who, as well as displaying excellent taste in music and literature, claims to have the skill of ‘remote viewing’. He allegedly employed this ability – ‘you pick a location, and you go there in your mind’ – on Project Deep Run, a secret services operation in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. His powers prove useful when Aaron and his friend Scott, ‘a flamboyant gypsy’, attempt to find the youths who assaulted them in a nightclub. Their subsequent plan – to steal the horses belonging to their assailants – triggers a chain of increasingly violent occurrences.

The novel unfolds across short, numbered scenes in a variety of places and time periods. Aaron’s younger brother was abducted in 1979 and is still missing. A detective who offers help with this mystery, Luke G B Caird, is romantically involved with a Georgian air hostess, who in turn has