One of the things that make England such a haunted place is its sheer antiquity. The great ghost story writers of that country are often possessed by the fear that the spirits of the old, pre-Christian ways will manifest themselves darkly in our bright modern world. Such is the slowly dawning terror of Andrew Michael Hurley’s magnificent new chiller The Loney:
I often thought there was too much time there. That the place was sick with it. Haunted by it. Time didn’t leak away as it should. There was nowhere for it to go and no modernity to hurry it along. It collected as the black water did on the marshes and remained and stagnated in the same way.
“There” in this case is the Loney, a wild and barely habited stretch of coastline in Lancashire where the narrator, his family, his parish priest and a few other members of the congregation would travel at Easter.
It was our week of penitence and prayer in which we would make our confessions, visit Saint Anne’s shrine, and look for God in the emerging springtime, that, when it came, was hardly a spring at all; nothing so vibrant and effusive. It was more the soggy afterbirth of winter.
The novel begins with the narrator (we never learn his real first name) hearing the news of a landslide in the area that caused an old house to slide down the cliff, and more disturbingly, of the baby’s skeleton found in the wreckage. Thus the story begins, revolving around a single still supernatural point, switching from the past history leading up to it and the present moment where it still reverberates.
It’s a hypnotic, richly realized work, with many strong ingredients. The narrator’s hyper-religious mother, obsessed with finding a miraculous cure for his mute older brother, is the propulsive force that pushes them into a return to the Loney, dragging along the new parish priest who has replaced the longstanding old one who died under mysterious circumstances. As in any good Gothic, the bleak and ancient landscape is itself a character, one with a dark tide that pulls toward oblivion as strongly as the stormy waves on the beach. The locals are sullen and threatening, their traditional customs strange and unsettling, and the weather awful as the modern world seems more and more distant.
The book has a slow and powerful sweep powered by the finely fashioned prose, creeping evermore creepily, much more like the classic Victorian and Edwardian writers Sheridan Le Fanu, Wilkie Collins or M. R. James than modern shocksters like Stephen King. The denouement is also very old school, with no exploding heads or rubber monsters, but a much more sinister sense of doom and discomfort, which in the end is far more effective.
It’s hard to categorize “The Loney,” to pigeonhole it as a Gothic, Ghost or Horror story, because it’s all that and more. What easy to say is that it’s a remarkable debut, a real dream of a nightmare that will haunt long after the last page.
