Steeped in a creeping dread
One ominous line begins a story of constant Gothic foreboding
The Loney, the debut novel from English writer Andrew Michael Hurley, arrives in Canada on an impressive wave of praise.
Not only has it been endorsed by writers including Stephen King, its British publication last year was followed by rapturous critical response, capped by its winning the Costa Book Award for best first novel and the British Book Industry Awards for book of the year and best debut. It’s the sort of praise which is both intriguing and somewhat worrying: is The Loney really that good? Yes. In fact, it’s better than I even imagined. The novel begins with the first of winter’s storms settling over England. London has it bad, but it’s worse in the north, where “train lines had been submerged, and whole villages swamped by brown river water.” Most notable for our narrator is a “sudden landslide on Coldbarrow, and the baby they’d found tumbled down with the old house at the foot of the cliffs.” He “always knew that what happened there wouldn’t stay hidden forever.”
With that ominous note, we’re drawn into the story of what happened 30 years before, when our narrator went, for the last time, on a pilgrimage to a shrine on the desolate English coast with his “Mummer and Farther,” the parish priest and members of the congregation, and his mute, developmentally-challenged brother Hanny. It had been a regular Easter journey for the devout Catholics, in hope that their piety and obeisance might result in a miracle for Hanny. This trip, however, is different, steeped with a creeping dread and a constant sense of foreboding.
The Loney is a genuinely terrifying read, but it’s not a horror story. Rather, it’s a novel of isolation and of festering relationships, of secret rooms and hidden guns, of subsumed violence and effigies in the forest. Every chapter tightens the grip of the storytelling, pressing the characters to the breaking point and beyond. It is not an easy book: The Loney is a novel suffused with questions around faith and belief, good and evil, and the very existence of morality itself. It’s an emotionally brutal read which will leave many readers utterly wrung out.
It is also, above all, one of the most powerful, insidious reads in recent memory. It deserves every bit of praise it has received.