The Loney: the contemporary classic

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There's a mysterious death at the heart of the novel; complicated and destructive family relationships, and running through it all a story of faith and superstition, imagination and fear. To the author's delight it was described as 'an amazing piece of fiction' by the master of modern gothic himself, Stephen King.

Fantastic, dark read especially for Halloween and for those who are fans of the first season of True Detective, Just finished this for the second, maybe third? time. The slightly freaky build up in the first third has little tidbits you may not really note the first time through, but in hindsight, the first chapters contain foggy clues as to the nature of what is to come. Ron Rash is renowned for his writing about Appalachia, but his latest book, The Caretaker, begins ... Year after year, their family visits the same sacred shrine on a desolate strip of coastline known as the Loney, in desperate hope of a cure. not noticing, or wilfully ignoring, the look of horror that Mummer tried to slide discreetly his way, as though on a folded piece of paper. Without” Gradually, as the story unfolds, we learn that Smith spent many Easters visiting the Loney – an isolated place on the coast, where there is a holy shrine. Smith’s brother Andrew, called Hanny, is mute, and possibly disabled, and the boy’s parents – ‘mummer’ and ‘farther’ visit the shrine with Mr and Mrs Belderboss and Father Wilfred, their parish priest and the brother of Mr Belderboss. Mummer is desperate for a miracle, to restore Hanny to normality, but then and they stop visiting for some years and Father Wilfred seems to suffer a crisis of faith.

Tonto, the truth isn’t always set in stone. In fact it never is. There are just versions of it. And sometimes it’s prudent to be selective about the version you choose to give to people.’ ‘But that’s lying, Father. You said so yourself.’ ‘Then I was being as naive as you.” I don’t remember either of us trying to run or fight or do anything, for that matter. I only remember the smell of the wet ferns, the sound of water churning out of a gutter, the feeling of numbness, knowing that no one was coming to help us and that we were surrounded by those people Father Wilfred had always warned us about but who we never thought we’d face, not really. Those people who existed in the realm of newspaper reports; dispatches from a completely different world where people had no capacity for guilt and trampled on the weak without a second thought.”

One of the joys (and frustrations) of writing a novel is that what you set out to do isn’t always what you end up doing. It wasn’t my intention to necessarily write a gothic horror and since the publication of The Loney I’ve been asking myself how it became one. As far as I can make out, the answer lies in the landscape that first inspired me. His second novel, Devil's Day, was published on 19 October 2017 by John Murray ( ISBN 978-1473619869) [11] and Tartarus Press ( ISBN 9781905784981) [12] Its setting, "The Endlands", is based on Langden valley in Lancashire's Forest of Bowland. [13] The book "deploys myth, landscape and the tropes of horror to chilling effect". [14] [15] Hurley was joint winner of the Royal Society of Literature's 2018 Encore Award for the best second novel. [16]

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. What is also critical in the protagonists’ lives and in the story proper is the part played by faith, even if it’s obvious by the end that such faith takes many forms, not all of them a matter of personal choice. I suspect that Hurley was brought up with Roman Catholicism: the detail of this in the novel is so authentic and convincing that I’d be surprised it he hadn’t been. Having had the same upbringing, I found the novel all the more realistic for the verisimilitude of religious detail – and, by its end, that authenticity makes things quite horrific.

supernatural horror without the supernatural horror. unless you consider fanatical, hypocritical so-called devotion to an organized religion like Christianity whose tenets often aren't actually understood let alone followed by many of its practitioners... to be supernatural horror. okay, this is supernatural horror! and I think I've used the phrase "supernatural horror" enough, right?

I don't think it has, possibly for the reasons above. I've never thought of myself as a 'town' or 'city' person and have always gravitated to the outdoors.” Your first novel ‘The Loney ’ has often been described as ‘Gothic’– why do you think this is and was this your intention?