Meanwhile, his sister, Alison, is obsessed with the JFK assassination, wrongly believing she was born just as the US president died in some kind of cosmic swap. Today, she would be seen as a young person living with mental illness and hopefully treated with some compassion, but this being the 1980s, she is threatened with expulsion to the “loony bin” and generally viewed as an irritant even as her self-destructive behaviour repeatedly lands her in hospital.

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Nick and Marion begin to suspect that Stretch, Becky’s menacing, one-eyed boyfriend, is somehow involved in the hit-and-run. A man with a propensity for both goofiness and violence, Stretch is prone to ranting about conspiracy theories, holding court on the influence of Masons and musing on Albert Einstein’s description of quantum entanglement as “spooky action at a distance”.

The mood darkens further as Becky begins expanding her business into harder drugs and Nick and Marion stumble upon bikie gangs operating in the area. The young man wrestles with adult fallibility, disappointment and the inevitability of change over the course of a vividly evoked summer.

Despite its darkness, this is a tale with too much sly humour for it ever to feel like a dirge and Womersley’s fascination with the resilience of the human spirit in even the direst circumstances shines through. The plotting is pacey, if sometimes pushed along by improbable coincidence and unusually chatty villains, and the events come to a head in a white-knuckle crescendo.

A skilfully constructed Rorschach test of a novel, Ordinary Gods and Monsters relays either a tragic but run-of-the-mill crime or a mystical constellation of linked events, depending on your viewpoint. What makes Womersley a special writer is his ability to seamlessly fuse these seemingly disparate threads, creating a self-contained world filled with equal parts dread and awe, ordinariness and otherworldliness.

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