Andrew Michael Hurley is a very talented writer, who finds -- and delivers -- the horror in the mundane.
In his first novel, The Loney, "the mundane" was the grief and desperate hope of a family with a developmentally disabled child, and the horrors that they submit to, in their hopes for a miracle cure. (What I liked about The Loney was the way that Hurley counterbalanced good ol' rip-roaring Rosemary's Baby style horror with the disabled child's parents' devotion to stifling, soul-destroying religious observance, in the hope that Hail Marys recited, and meals skipped, and joylessness achieved will earn their boy the miracle they yearn for. As I said in my review of that novel, it was in the story of the family and fellow parishioners on their pilgrimage to a grim "holy well" on the Lancashire coast that I found the real horror story, rather than the goings on in the creepy house over the sands.)
Here, in his third novel, Hurley has, I think, learned his lesson to keep it simple: the mundane horror here is the desperate grief of a couple at the sudden death of their 5-year-old son. Hurley's skill is stripping away, layer by layer, any sense that the Reader may have that they "understand" this tragedy -- as, bit by bit, the details of the child Ewan, his parents Richard and Juliette, and even their family backstories are revealed, it's clear that something deeply disturbing has been going on here.
As is often the case with horror, don't expect an ending with answers or resolutions.
Could be described as "eco-horror", where nature turns on humanity, and gets revenge for the horrors that we have inflicted on the plant and animal world ... and how our human arrogance leaves us open to its bewitchment.
In his first novel, The Loney, "the mundane" was the grief and desperate hope of a family with a developmentally disabled child, and the horrors that they submit to, in their hopes for a miracle cure. (What I liked about The Loney was the way that Hurley counterbalanced good ol' rip-roaring Rosemary's Baby style horror with the disabled child's parents' devotion to stifling, soul-destroying religious observance, in the hope that Hail Marys recited, and meals skipped, and joylessness achieved will earn their boy the miracle they yearn for. As I said in my review of that novel, it was in the story of the family and fellow parishioners on their pilgrimage to a grim "holy well" on the Lancashire coast that I found the real horror story, rather than the goings on in the creepy house over the sands.)
Here, in his third novel, Hurley has, I think, learned his lesson to keep it simple: the mundane horror here is the desperate grief of a couple at the sudden death of their 5-year-old son. Hurley's skill is stripping away, layer by layer, any sense that the Reader may have that they "understand" this tragedy -- as, bit by bit, the details of the child Ewan, his parents Richard and Juliette, and even their family backstories are revealed, it's clear that something deeply disturbing has been going on here.
As is often the case with horror, don't expect an ending with answers or resolutions.
Could be described as "eco-horror", where nature turns on humanity, and gets revenge for the horrors that we have inflicted on the plant and animal world ... and how our human arrogance leaves us open to its bewitchment.
