Book of the dayHorror books This article is more than 4 years oldReviewStarve Acre by Andrew Michael Hurley review – folk horror goes back to the 70s
This article is more than 4 years oldHostile locals, grieving parents, a sinister oak: this addition to the canon of ‘English Weird’ has its origins in pastiche
It is winter in the 1970s. Richard and Juliette Willoughby have taken their young son from the city to live in the bleak and isolated house on the Yorkshire moors where Richard grew up. Juliette felt certain her family would find sanctuary and freedom at Starve Acre, but with the sudden and devastating death of five-year-old Ewan, the strangeness and loneliness of the place have become oppressive, symbolising the widening distance between the grieving couple.
Unable to come to terms with the loss of her child, Juliette becomes increasingly involved with a local spiritualist group called the Beacons and their leader, Mrs Forde, who claims the ability to open a bridge between the living and the dead. Demoralised by Juliette’s retreat into what he sees as superstitious claptrap, Richard camps out in the mysteriously barren field that gives Starve Acre its name. He is digging for the remains of the Stythwaite Oak, an ancient tree that forms the subject of a series of peculiar wood engravings and that was once the site of a notorious public hanging. He has half-convinced himself that the oak was somehow the cause of the sinister personality changes that affected Ewan shortly before his death, and is possibly the lair of the malevolent nature-spirit Jack Grey, with whom the boy had become obsessed. When Richard discovers the skeleton of a hare in the place where the tree once grew, he cannot escape the suspicion that the two deaths are linked.
Horror fiction thrives on its classic scenarios, of which troubled-couple-move-to-cursed-mansion is a perennial favourite. What sets Starve Acre apart from more mundane examples is the quality of Hurley’s writing, his landscape writing in particular:
The sound of shotguns and whistles doubled in air that was uncannily still and expectant after the blizzard. The storm had lasted for hours and the extent of its fury was marked by icy cornices blown over the dry-stone walls. They were wild jagged crests, like those of a sea surge breaking on inadequate defences.
Such evocative passages typify Hurley’s almost preternatural sense of place, and are stunningly effective in conjuring the pervasive, escalating tension that defines his story. Hurley’s feel for landscape as a defining characteristic of horror must count as a large part of what made his 2014 debut The Loney so successful. If anything, Starve Acre demonstrates an evolution and concentration of his ability to summon a world divided and defined by the uncanny. If I have a problem with this novel, it has less to do with literary technique than with the ultimate direction and purpose of the narrative itself.
In terms of its language and chilling atmosphere, Hurley’s 2017 follow-up to The Loney, Devil’s Day, was as persuasive as ever. The plot, though, seemed more flatly generic, a bitter little tale of a professional city woman bullied into subservience by a bunch of rural patriarchs, told seemingly without irony. Starve Acre is compromised by similar issues: on this occasion it is Juliette who enforces the decision to move to the “bad place” but we are left in no doubt as to how irrational we are supposed to find her behaviour, while Richard – poor, patient, put-upon Richard – is suggested as the worthy recipient of our sympathies. His deluded mother and Juliette’s domineering sister are similarly derided. Such retrograde gender politics quickly becomes tiresome, as does the endlessly rehashed cliche about unfriendly villagers: how many more hostile local yokels does horror fiction need?
It could be argued that the dated tone is a deliberate attempt to evoke the more openly parochial attitudes of the time in which the novel is set – the manner in which the book’s one homosexual character is ostracised, for example, and the unthinking, blanket divide between “locals” and “incomers”. Hurley’s understanding of and love for 70s horror is clear. Such a love should not preclude political engagement, however, and from an author as gifted as him I would have hoped for more counter-argument and less mimicry. Most of all, I would have liked the novel to reveal some substance and identity aside from the skilful reiteration of tropes already familiar from the books and films that defined this brand of rural horror the first time around.
Starve Acre was originally conceived for the Eden Book Society project, a crowd-funded initiative set up by independent publisher Dead Ink to publish “lost” works of horror fiction from the past hundred years. The project’s supporters were well aware that the cover story was something of a metafictional device: these works were not cult classics, but new books by contemporary writers hiding behind pseudonymous identities. The first tranche of titles released were ostensibly from the 1970s and Starve Acre was one of them, the true name of its author quickly becoming an open secret.
This new, slightly expanded edition tones down some of the more overt horror elements that characterised the original, but while the novel is an enjoyable addition to the canon of “English Weird”, its origins in pastiche present the critic with something of a dilemma. Should we read it as a well-executed homage to the era-defining horror of Nigel Kneale, Robert Aickman and David Rudkin, or as a novel that unwittingly reveals the new folk horror as a nostalgic, not to say regressive exercise, defined and underpinned by assumptions that feel faded and irrelevant?
Horror is regularly vilified for being a conservative genre. This accusation is often without merit, as recent novels by Catriona Ward, Sarah Perry and Sarah Maria Griffin amply demonstrate. Yet it can still be the case that the very seductiveness of its tropes – the haunted houses, the bleak moorlands, the ancient burial grounds – can prevent writers from sufficiently questioning what they are for. Hurley is a graceful, confident stylist and for this reason alone he is a joy to read. But I would hope to see him being a little more adventurous – and less accommodating – on his next outing.
Nina Allan’s The Dollmaker is published by Riverrun. 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 £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
Explore more on these topicsShareReuse this contentncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaJqfpLi0e5FpaHJnnqTDcH6SaKqtmaKrsm6twqucZpmemb%2Bmw4ymoJygkZq5brTUq6OesV2nsre1xLA%3D