The novel presents itself as a creative critical artefact, simultaneously fictitious and autoethnographic, borrowing from the disciplines of Fine Art and Film Studies to convey its troubling narrative. England has been torn apart in a civil war over immigration and ethnic minorities, the fighting long over but terrorists persisting in the knowledge that they are right. The Dogs, led by a disillusioned soldier from the traumatising conflict, recruit aimless adolescent boys wanting to be “men”, desensitising them to violence through film and ritualistic savagery. Lee struggles with the ease with which he excels in this world, far removed from his mother and young sister, Cissy, and it is only when he discovers that Muma is regularly prostituting the nine-year-old that his new aptitudes spill into his home. Lee and Cissy escape to the Dog’s base - a House that writes on its own walls, sitting close to the Wall bisecting the country, and it is here that Lee discovers the immolating roots of the faction, and the destructive impetus behind their acts. The artefact is sentient. It obfuscates its own text to protect Cissy, steals the words of other texts amidst scenes of torture to explain itself as it squirms and morphs within the reader’s hands, wrestles with its own abject content and sends endless warnings for the reader to stop and look away. This continues a theme of magical realism that sees animal totems as guardians and a landscape as emotionally scarred as any person by conflict and suffering. Reality is unstable, as are facile presumptions about justice and truth. Closer to Home is an example of practice-led research, wherein the text illuminates and examines the creative process behind writing physical violence, child sexual violence and simulacra violence, finding the domestic and familial roots of abject fiction writing.