Starve Acre by Andrew Michael Hurley review – an atmospheric tale
Andrew Michael Hurley has been carving out a niche for himself as a notable writer of modern gothic since the success of his Costa-winning debut, The Loney, and his third novel, Starve Acre, offers an atmospheric tale in the same tradition of English folk-horror.
Hurley has a fine talent for evoking the menace of his northern landscapes
The period is never made explicit, but this is a world of typewriters, landlines and record players, where one character drives a “tea-coloured Austin”; it’s a setting clearly reminiscent of the golden age of TV ghost stories in the 1970s. Richard and Juliette Willoughby, shut away in their isolated house, Starve Acre, in the Yorkshire Dales, are failing to cope with their grief for their five-year-old son, Ewan, who died suddenly six months earlier. Richard spends his days excavating the barren field from which the house takes its name, looking for the roots of the ancient gallows tree that once grew there, while Juliette is convinced Ewan is still present and stays up all night making recordings in his bedroom. Richard discovers woodcuts among his father’s old books that show three young men of the village hanged on the tree for terrible crimes, to which they were provoked by a mysterious figure called Jack Grey. “He was really just another Green Man or Robin Goodfellow or Hag o’ the Hay. The fickle entity that either spoiled or swelled the crop. The whistler in the woods. The stranger on the road at dusk.”
As the story moves between the events leading to Ewan’s death and its aftermath, we learn that the family had been ostracised by the villagers, thanks to the boy’s increasingly violent behaviour. When Richard uncovers the complete skeleton of a hare in the field and takes it home, at the same time as Juliette asks a group of local occultists to contact her dead son, it’s clear that something terrible has been invited from the wild world outside to cross the threshold.
Related: Halloween reading with Andrew Michael Hurley – books podcast
Hurley has a fine talent for evoking the menace of his northern landscapes; places where weather, rock and trees embody an active hostility to human endeavour and comfort. Pagan ritual offers a more immediate connection to supernatural forces than well-worn Christian rites here as in his two previous books, and elements of the novel offer a nod to his influences: MR James’s story A View from a Hill, and Baby, from Nigel Kneale’s 1976 ITV series Beasts (the final, vivid page of Starve Acre feels like a direct homage to that episode).
There is one inconsistency that, for me, weakens the story. Richard is positioned as the academic sceptic, like one of James’s characters; he’s scornful of the occultists’ “tricks” and rationalises away his son’s talk of Jack Grey and his late father’s madness, yet he seems unperturbed by an obviously magical event that occurs before his very eyes, concluding only that “[it] had been unnatural but it had required no intellectual sacrifice”. This feels like a cop-out, and is an odd flaw in an otherwise enjoyably chilling tale for a wild winter night.
• Starve Acre by Andrew Michael Hurley is published by John Murray (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 020-3176 3837. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
