In their neglected, decaying family estate on the cliffs of the northern Cornish coast, two Anglo-Catholic brothers grow up in parasitic isolation during a time marked by the decay of English nobility. The elder, Alexander, is equal parts devout and sadistic, lording over Francis, the younger, as his tormentor and God. Oscillating between dreamlike fragments from their insular childhood to their final, sharp descent to madness in 1928, Thorngale is a chilling gothic horror tale of obsessive love and fatal devotion, written with the cutting, claustrophobic spiral of an ever tightening concertina wire.