The Devil has his day
Andrew Micheal Hurley’s dark second novel is a very rewarding read
With his first novel, English writer Andrew Michael Hurley enjoyed the fairy tale success most writers only dream of. Originally published by a small press in an edition of 300 copies, The Loney – a chilling, folk-horror masterpiece – was picked up by a larger publisher and went on to become a bestseller and to win the Costa First Book Award and the British Book Award.
Hurley’s second novel, Devil’s Day, shows no sign of the author buckling under his success. In fact, it may even be a stronger novel than his debut.
Devil’s Day begins with Hurley describing the autumn “just over a century ago” when “the Devil killed one of the ewes and tore off her fleece to hide himself among the flock” as the farmers of the Endlands rounded up their sheep from the moors where they had been grazing over the summer. In the village, the Devil went about his work, 13 people were dead when he was through.
John Pentecost grew up with the stories, and the set of rituals — Devil’s Day — the townsfolk believed would prevent the Devil’s return. John, who moved to Suffolk to teach, is called back by the death of his grandfather, the Gaffer. John had been intending to return to help with the Gathering, the retrieval of the sheep from the moors, “only now there would be a funeral first.”
It’s his wife Kat’s first visit to the Endlands, and readers are introduced to the isolated rural community, barely eking out survival, through her sudden immersion. She is unwelcome, treated with derision, haunted by mysterious visions and a pervasive stench. She wants to leave as quickly as possible, but John, it is slowly revealed, has other plans. The farm is his birthright, after all, and that of their unborn son. Why wouldn’t they stay?
And as Devil’s Day approaches, it begins to seem that perhaps Kat isn’t the only stranger in town. The Devil, it seems, may already be there …
Devil’s Day is a slow-burn of a novel, horrors gradually emerging from mists of memory and myth. Characters are built slowly and convincingly as readers come to understand the life of the land and its relationship with the people who work it, time slipping and shifting from past to future, the present little more than a nebulous, amorphous waystation in the passage of ages. Devil’s Day is a novel that requires — and rewards — close reading as Hurley builds an entire world, familiar and mysterious, warm and dank, human and something distinctly, distressingly, other.