The Loney: the contemporary classic

Product Information

supernatural horror without the supernatural horror. unless you consider fanatical, hypocritical so-called devotion to an organized religion like Christianity whose tenets often aren't actually understood let alone followed by many of its practitioners... to be supernatural horror. okay, this is supernatural horror! and I think I've used the phrase "supernatural horror" enough, right? After Hanny is healed the family leaves and its all over. If Hanny and his brother had not stumbled upon the group of satanists at the end of the novel the family would have left and nothing would have changed. All of the build up for danger was for nothing? Fans of gothic horror and psychological thrillers will sense the presence of Horace Walpole, Mary Shelley, and even Poe, hovering over this book like guardian angels of darkness. But Hurley's narrative never provides the climatic jolt necessary to bring the otherworldly terrors fully into this world. His story offers a thoughtful, restrained, and literary denouement but most fans of gothic fiction will want a few doors noisily slammed, a few bell towers to crumble to dust, and maybe even a reanimated corpse. Is that too much to ask after spending so much time cowering under the bed? After Wilfred's death, a new priest comes in, Father Bernard, trying to find some fresh passion in the Church, and a chance for a pi

Year after year, their family visits the same sacred shrine on a desolate strip of coastline known as the Loney, in desperate hope of a cure. Lastly, if you're a Catholic, prepare to possibly be offended. The good news is that the Irish priest who plays the biggest role in the story is a gem, and he has a Labrador retriever to boot. Perfect dog to go chase a ball at the beach, but never, ever, ever at the Loney. 5 stars. Once the tables had been wiped clean, Mummer draped the dishcloth over the tap in the kitchen, Farther switched off the lights and we went out into the slush. It seemed an absurd ending to a life.” Merritt, Stephanie (29 October 2019). "Starve Acre by Andrew Michael Hurley review – an atmospheric tale". The Guardian . Retrieved 25 November 2019.

Obviously The Loney was predominantly about faith. Devil’s Day is probably not quite so much about organised religion, but there are definite parallels between the two books. It’s a kind of giving over to something bigger, a faith in something much bigger than yourself, where the individual doesn’t matter so much as the group. They’re both about a kind of fundamentalism.

He is not above throwing in a piece of utilitarian prose to keep things moving, as if worried that the novel will get bogged down in the density of the language and imagery, although there’s little fear of it. Hurley shows genre skill in the framing episodes at the beginning and end. You know,' he said, 'my daddy used to say that death has the timing of the world's worst comedian and I think he was right.” Apostolides, Zoë (3 November 2017). "Devil's Day by Andrew Michael Hurley — northern frights". Financial Times . Retrieved 8 April 2019. It was the same fearful excitement we felt when we happened to drive through what Mummer considered a bad part of London and found ourselves lost in a maze of terraces that sat shoulder to shoulder with industrial plants and scrapyards. We would turn in our seats and gawp out of the windows at the scruffy, staring children who had no toys but the bits of wood and metal torn off the broken furniture in their front yards where aproned women stood and screeched obscenities at the men stumbling out of corner pubs. It was a safari park of degradation.”

Beyond the Book

Despite its harshness, it’s certainly somewhere that could make you feel released from the modern world… The answers to these questions are often unsettling, and occasionally horrific. But as we see Father Bernard’s faith in action and how it differs from Mummer’s and Father Wilfred’s, as we begin discover the powerful and primitive beliefs of the people of the Lancashire countryside, we are drawn—as Tonto and Hanny are drawn—into questioning the nature of belief itself and our own relationship to faith.

The Loney has been reviewed in The Guardian and The Telegraph. [6] [7] It is set in the area of Morecambe Bay in north west England, described in the text as "that strange nowhere between the Wyre and the Lune". [4] Hurley has said that the novel's two starting points were "to write a kind of dark version of the Nativity [...] and exploring ideas of faith and belief" and "various wild, lonely places on the north west coast of Lancashire [...] a sense of imminent menace or dormant power lying just under the sand and the water". [8] It is the winner of the 2015 Costa Book Awards First Novel Award [9] as well as the British Book Industry award for best debut fiction and book of the year. [10]

Your new novel, Devil’s Day, is set in a remote farming community called the Endlands. How did it begin its life? I also think maybe Colliard etc, were perhaps just trying to intimidate Tonto and everyone into leaving as they didn't want to be discovered on Thessaly (or what they were doing) rather than actually harm them? Enigmatic and distinctly unsettling.... The Loney's power lies in all that Hurley dares to leave out. This is a novel of the unsaid, the implied, the barely grasped or understood, crammed with dark holes and blurry spaces that your imagination feels compelled to fill. It takes both confidence and talent to write like this and it leaves you wanting more of whatever slice of darkness Hurley might choose to dish up next. MyHome.ie (Opens in new window) • Top 1000 • The Gloss (Opens in new window) • Recruit Ireland (Opens in new window) • Irish Times Training (Opens in new window)

Also, I was a bit confused as to the nature and to what degree Tonto had been "stalking" Hanny in the years (decades) that followed. Clearly Tonto had been prescribed therapy and it seemed he and Hanny were no longer on speaking terms until the very end of the story, after the baby's body has been found and the subsequent "awakening" of memories in Hanny. But during the "stalking" periods (standing outside the window, whatever) what exactly was Tonto trying to do? What was he hoping to achieve? Was he trying to get Hanny to regain his memory of the events? That doesn't sound like something he'd do, making Hanny relive something that horrible. Was he just compelled to be a "protective presence" around Hanny since he'd failed him during their time at the Loney? But it sounds like this went on for decades--forty years, in fact! I don’t remember either of us trying to run or fight or do anything, for that matter. I only remember the smell of the wet ferns, the sound of water churning out of a gutter, the feeling of numbness, knowing that no one was coming to help us and that we were surrounded by those people Father Wilfred had always warned us about but who we never thought we’d face, not really. Those people who existed in the realm of newspaper reports; dispatches from a completely different world where people had no capacity for guilt and trampled on the weak without a second thought.” I think that’s partly what John, in the novel, appreciates about the place. There’s a kind of reduction – a simple sort of living. There are only certain things that are of value, only certain things which are worth doing because they contribute to the community; and if they don’t, then they don’t do them. There is a kind of very attractive simplicity about living in a place like that – all the superfluous crap that the modern world throws at you and you have to digest and consume and aspire to do doesn’t really exist in that community. Yet there is also the unpredictability of the elements that is quite menacing and threatens to undermine all this. Hurley’s first novel, The Loney, was widely praised. Stephen King declared: “It’s great. It’s an amazing piece of fiction.” Originally published by a small press in a run of just 300 copies, it went on to win the Costa best first novel of the year and book of the year at the British Book Industry awards.Life here arose of its own accord and for no particular reason. It went unexamined, and died unremembered.”