The Loney: the contemporary classic

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Else had clearly had children for Leonard (or the satanists) before, as when she is in labour she tells Hanny it's less painful each time (or something along these lines). Apostolides, Zoë (3 November 2017). "Devil's Day by Andrew Michael Hurley — northern frights". Financial Times . Retrieved 8 April 2019. A very devout Catholic family travel with their priest, and some fellow members of their church, to the Loney – a wild stretch of the Lancashire coast. They’re hoping to pray for the health of one of the sons - a mute, slightly retarded boy called Hanney. The narrator of the story is Hanney’s brother, Smith. They stay at a run down, creepy old house called The Moorings. In a nutshell it's about a young lad whose Mother thinks that her religious beliefs and devotion will cure his brother who is unable to speak. The story mainly focuses on a particular pilgrimage (there have been many) they make with their church group to a shrine on the English coast.

The Loney” feels like a perfect read as we ease into Autumn for the tremendous sense of atmosphere and introspection it creates. This could have easily been a more straightforward spooky story of outsiders who stumble into a provincial area ruled by sinister old rituals, but Hurley makes it a much more nuanced and meaningful story than that. It's a novel with a lot of mystery and ambiguity – particularly because it's only told from the narrator's point of view and I gradually began to wonder if he's entirely trustworthy. He asserts towards the end that “Details are truth.” “The Loney” is a novel whose magnificent details evocatively and precisely evoke a certain kind of mood which seeps into your skin and makes you want to read on. While not faultless – some passages might have been tightened by another turn of the screw – Hurley’s prose style is perfectly fitted to the form, mingling vivid descriptive phrases (“Stone walls shone like iron”) with an ear for the oddness of conversation. There is something noirish about the darkness of the stonework in Manchester and the grim weather too. Beyond that, perhaps there's nothing particularly 'Gothic' about Manchester compared with any other place in the north, but I think that in the 'city' in general there can be sensations one might associate with that mode or genre. Maybe the busyness and the amount of people create a different kind of threat to the caprices of the natural world. In the city there is always the danger of chaos, riot and violence.” Why would you encourage people to write about the darker/hidden aspects of landscape and life?

Hurley suspends the story in a limbo between the supernatural and the merely strange: it is not clear whether the fantastic has occurred, or whether characters are mad, or which of these would be worse. Where the supernatural is most explicitly suggested (a hawthorn blooming well before its season, say), it is done almost in passing, so that one may begin to doubt one’s own experience of the novel. This putting out of a hand to tug the reader into the text is at the crux of the gothic, and is as rare as it is delicious. Sarah Perry And there is a boy, Andrew, called Hanny. He’s mute and somewhat withdrawn, perhaps autistic though it’s not defined. Every year the group with their priest-guide, father Wilfred, set off to the coastal Loney in kind of pilgrimage, to visit the remotely located sanctuary and pray for cure Andrew. On the spot they used to stay at Moorings, an isolated and rather creepy house.

Lastly, if you're a Catholic, prepare to possibly be offended. The good news is that the Irish priest who plays the biggest role in the story is a gem, and he has a Labrador retriever to boot. Perfect dog to go chase a ball at the beach, but never, ever, ever at the Loney. 5 stars.Born in 1975, growing up near Preston and still living in North West England, a frequent visitor of the coastal edges - Hurley’s prose is prominently touched by place. His work could appear interlaced with a seam of sashaying, mysterious moodiness moving in from the environs which inclines his writing style and subject matter so well to the Gothic genre.