THERE ARE PLACES in the world so imbued with histories and mysteries that their very names have come to sound magical: Delphi, Samarkand, Constantinople, Ashford.

Granted, the unprepossessing town in Kent does not traditionally feature on this list, but having read the latest instalment in Nicola Barker’s narrative of the Thames Gateway, you will never again pass through it without shuddering into your Eurostar headrest.

For the Ashford of Darkmans is a place possessed, cross-wired and many layered, where history won’t lie still and madness – in the form of the shady folk-figure of the title – lurks around every corner.

Or at least that’s how it feels to Kane, his father Beede, Beede’s friend Isidore, and Isidore’s son Fleet, all of whom find themselves haunted by a 16th-century court jester, John Scogin, a man so obscene and cruel that the King banished him to France. He is: “This Dionysian spirit. This total arsehole.” And he is in their heads.

Fleet is 4 and has spent months carefully constructing a matchstick replica of the French town of Albi. This, coupled with the incessantly dripping roof of the family’s marshland new-build, leaves his mother, the sexy chiropodist Elen Grass, sufficiently distraught to welcome the ministrations of both Beede and Kane. Beede offers her the support that her beautiful but quite mad husband, Isidore, can’t. Kane goes to visit her about a verruca but comes away with revelations about his past.

And all the while, each one is being hounded by the strange words and images that come to them, all seemingly related to John Scogin, and many in languages – symbolic and actual – that they barely understand.

For light relief, there are: Kane’s ex, Kelly, daughter of the infamous Dina Broad (“Jabba the Hut with a council flat”); Gaffar, a Kurd, obsessed with peacocks and phobic of lettuce (a pairing apparently unique to the secretive Iraqi cult into which he was born); and Peta Borough, a glamor-ous, art-forging medievalist with a pimped-out Jamaican Lada.

Barker’s impressionistic interweaving of inner and outer voices, and her splendid ear for the varieties of Estuary English, lend a deceptive intimacy to what is ultimately quite a lofty inquiry into the uses and abuses of history, both private and public.

But every good story must have a twist or two, and the spirit of misrule pervades at every level in Darkmans. By the end, you can’t help imagining a giggling Barker, hat-bells tinkling as she scribbles, relishing the thought of always being one step ahead of her audience, and never quite relinquishing that last laugh.

This is the work of a very fine storyteller indeed, one who has already won prizes for her fiction and doubtless will go on to win more. Perhaps not since Robertson Davies – whose What’s Bred in the Bone, also a jesters-and-forgery-themed drama of small-town fathers and sons, is in many ways the faerie godfather of this one – has there been so able a welder of the academic and the arcane.

DARKMANS by Nicola Barker

Fourth Estate, £17.99; 400pp

Buy the book here for the offer price of £16.19 (free p&p)

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