THERE ARE MOMENTS during Neil Cross’s fifth novel when the sense of foreboding is so strong that you half-expect to find cobwebs between the pages. What is it about his writing that makes you so certain that bad things are about to happen?

You could say that the cover of Natural History – a picture of a child in shorts perched on a dishwasher brandishing a blood-stained carving knife – gives it away. But Cross is not a horror writer by trade; he’s a much more slippery beast.

This is not the calm before the storm in a Stephen King novel. If you read the synopsis, you will know that stray panthers, murdered monkeys and “a parent’s worst nightmare” lurk within, but that’s not what makes you turn the pages apprehensively so much as the stripped-down yet pregnant propulsion of Cross’s prose.

He has done this slow-build thing before, particularly in 2004’s Always The Sun, a white-knuckle tale of bullying and parental angst with an ending as winding as running into a tree stump full-pelt in the dead of night. But Natural History is much weirder. It is set at Monkeyland, a dilapidated ape sanctuary in Devon with a gate that “resembles a Soviet border-crossing”. Patrick, a failed adventure-story writer, and his zoologist wife Jane star in the type of documentary that would make Ben Fogle wake up screaming. It’s not just Jane’s careerism that has led them here. This is supposed to be a fresh start, an escape from the stalker who has ruined their marriage.

It’s also a place where their daughter Jo can recover from boarding school and their troubled son Charlie can convalesce after having his heart broken by a Britpop-loving girlfriend while roughing it in a Bath squat.

But the apes are dying and Patrick thinks that he has spotted a panther lurking near the garden. This is frightening, but perhaps not as frightening as Cross’s tendency to throw in when you least expect it sentences such as: “Dave [the documentary cameraman] wasn’t morally responsible, any more than a spider-hunting wasp, which paralysed its prey before allowing its larvae to eat them alive from the inside out.”

The setting is Britain in the period immediately before the Blair Government, but Cross is only moderately concerned with popular culture. He uses it where needed (the prospect of “two tickets to Babes in the Wood starring Jim Davidson and the Krankies” adds a certain creepiness to Jane and Patrick’s relationship) but he is much more interested in the stuff way underneath that: primal instincts, random desire, ancient behavioural training.

“We were adapted to live in the shadow of predators,” he writes. Almost everyone here – from Monkeyland’s apes, to Patrick, who kicks his dog when nobody is looking, to the UFO-obsessed loner who tutors Jo – seems to have the potential for animal violence: a whole chapter can go by with little happening other than someone going for a jog and making breakfast, but it still feels tainted and pungent.

Cross’s style – sometimes childlike, sometimes strangely mundane, sometimes obtuse – is deceptively busy. It will make you believe that you are merely reading a masterclass in minimal, plot-driven horror realism, until you get two thirds of the way through, and suddenly realise that the book has taken you to war-torn Zaire, painted a portrait of a real semi-rural England not seen enough in fiction, and made some terrifying comments about darkest-hour human nature. The expertly delivered shocks may stay with you for a few days, but there’s something meatier and more fetid hidden that will walk behind you for considerably longer.

NATURAL HISTORY by Neil Cross

Simon & Schuster, £11.99; 320pp

Buy the book here for the offer price of £10.79 (free p&p)

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