By Julie F.

“I took everything that was offered that morning – the warm sunlight, the soft shadows on the fields, the spangle of a brook as it wound under some willows towards the sea – and managed to convince myself that nothing would harm us.

Such naivety makes me laugh now” (173).

Confession: passages like the one above give me shivers. I’ve never been a horror fan. My experience with horror films consists of a mediocre made-for-TV movie called Midnight Offerings at a high school party, featuring Melissa Sue Anderson of Little House on the Prairie fame, and a viewing of The Shining with fellow grad students back in 1992. That’s it. Books, even less. Stephen King? I adore his nonfiction, follow him on Twitter, and used to read his columns in Entertainment Weekly religiously. But I can’t bring myself to tackle Carrie or Salem’s Lot.

Splitting hairs when it comes to genre, though – most librarians do this with aplomb. My brain has always differentiated between horror and ghost stories, and I love a good ghost story. Starting with the Victorian favorites in the genre, the short stories of J.S. LeFanu and M.R. James, all the way to The Woman in Black by Susan Hill and The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters, the touch of the paranormal that wends its way into the life of unsuspecting mortals on this plane thrills and fascinates me. A more recent but equally compelling genre, folk horror, bridges the gap between ghostly folklore and fiction. As noted by editor Dawn Keetley in Revenant, the journal of the supernatural and the weird, “folk horror is rooted in the dark ‘folk tale’, in communal stories of monsters, ghosts, violence, and sacrifice that occupy the threshold between history and fiction.” There are some incredible writers forging creative new work in this genre, and Andrew Michael Hurley is one of the best.

The Loney opens with a group of modern, penitent pilgrims making an annual trip to the title locale, “a wild and useless length of English coastline” (3), where they spend a week at Easter, culminating with a visit to St. Anne’s shrine. It’s 1975, and we are seeing all this through the viewpoint of the teenage narrator, nicknamed “Tonto” by the young, wise-beyond-his-years priest who accompanies the group. Tonto knows that his situation is unusual; his brother Hanny has been mute his entire life, and his excessively devout mother (Mummer) is determined to pray her way to healing for him. For her, religion, and particularly the rituals enacted that comfort her year after year, are the only possibility for a cure.

While staying on the Loney in what could barely be described as a village, a number of disturbing acts take place: an effigy made of animal parts is hung in the woods, Father Bernard is warned to stay away from the pub, and a wooden statue of Jesus that hung in the local church is smashed to bits on Easter morning. Tonto experiences a sense of creeping unease when a gull with a broken wing suddenly takes off in flight. The locals don’t seem disturbed when a dead tree struck by lightning decades ago suddenly sprouts a new branch, or when their apple trees, usually ripe in autumn, are laden with spring fruit virtually overnight. There’s a healing power at work in this weird place that has nothing to do with Mummer’s fervent Catholicism, a power emanating from beliefs and practices that are much, much older than her faith. In the framing story, we learn that Tonto was shaken by everything he learned to the point that, decades later, he’s lost his faith: “Like Father Bernard said, there are only versions of the truth. And it’s the strong, the better strategists who manage them” (294).

The dark, brooding atmosphere permeates the novel, catapulting Hurley into fame as one of the foremost practitioners of folk horror and earning him praise from Stephen King (“An amazing piece of fiction”) and the Costa First Novel Award. He conveys a sense of otherworldly, uneasy time and place that can only result in the darkness of savage nature reclaiming itself: “I often thought there was too much time there. That the place was sick with it. Haunted by it. There was nowhere for it to go and no modernity to hurry it along. It collected as the black water did on the marshes and remained and stagnated in the same way” (31). If you’re in search of an eerie Halloween read that doesn’t spell everything out but stretches the imagination relentlessly – a book that also addresses real questions of faith and family from the eyes of a boy coming of age – then read The Loney.

Julie is an instructor and research specialist at HCLS Miller Branch who finds her work as co-editor of Chapter Chats very rewarding. She loves gardening, birds, crime fiction, all kinds of music, and the great outdoors.