Told in flashbacks this story captures the claustrophobic nature of small, insular communities where people are steeped in tradition and ritual ... Andrew Hurley is a master at making his readers question their skeptical certainties! He is equally adept at evoking a powerful sense of time and place by using well-chosen words to capture a way of life which depends on people feeling as hefted to their community and way of life as their sheep are to their moorland territory ... Having read and enjoyed Andrew Michael Hurley’s remarkable debut novel, The Loney (winner of the 2015 Costa First Novel Award), I had wondered whether his second novel could possibly live up to my hopes and expectations. However, I need not have feared because Devil’s Day is equally powerful and engaging—in fact I think it is an even better one! I found that each one of his characters was immediately convincing because he succeeded in portraying their endless struggles to live with the precarious nature of their environment. His unsentimental descriptions of the frequently cruel and bloody nature of farming and country life added depth and authenticity to his descriptions of their lives ... I really appreciate the elegance and the literary quality of his writing and the fact that he makes every word count in his story-telling, with not one description feeling superfluous.
Hurley is a writer’s writer, his descriptions of landscape and character precise and evocative ... The Endlands are a character themselves, one with a gloomy disposition and a tendency to self-medicate. The novel is narrated from John’s perspective. His voice is infused with the cadences of the local dialect, a style that is vibrant and melodic, yet just strange enough to throw me off balance from time to time. Such disorientation served a narrative purpose: I never felt fully comfortable in the novel. I was always left a little on edge, which is a good thing in a scary story. Hurley’s ability to create unease, combined with his unquestionable talent, make Devil’s Day a standout horror novel as well as a piece of literary art. There were times, however, when I struggled to keep reading. The pacing was lackadaisical, and I found that Hurley relies too heavily on ambience and dialogue to move his story forward. I wanted more to happen ... That said, Devil’s Day is as spooky as it gets.
Hurley excels at claustrophobically small communities. The landscape of the Endlands is vast—moors to the horizon, rivers that roil and flood — but its inhabitants are as penned as the dogs in their kennels. John has tried to leave, but the land—the Devil?—calls him back. Hurley is a superb storyteller. He leads you up on to the moors, into the eye of a snowstorm, dropping little clues, sinister hints at devilment and demonic possession. Then he changes course, scuffs over the prints in the snow, springs new villainies on you, abandons you overnight in the hills. The moment you feel secure in your skepticism—there’s no such thing as devils—Hurley sows a seed of doubt ... At times the book bags and slows. It has all the fear and shivers of an MR James tale, but not the tautness. A slight shear—the chit-chat of the farmers’ wives drags—would make the difference.
Set within hailing distance of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights not only geographically but imaginatively, the novel spreads a welter of rawly vivid injury and violence through its pages. From sadistic bullying among the young to long-nursed hostilities among the old, savagery lashes out. Physical damage—scars from childhood, loss of an eye or finger, a crushed hip—is pervasive ... Nevertheless, despite nerve-stabbing moments—a wild dog’s bark abruptly mutating into a child’s sobs—there’s sometimes a whiff of the recycled about the novel’s apparatus of Satanism. Hurley doesn’t need the devil’s help to grip you. His taut writing does that for him. Nature’s routine cruelties are caught with a fierce accuracy that Ted Hughes would have admired ... it’s the perils of living that Hurley most memorably conveys.
Hurley employs many classic horror tropes—shrill, stray shrieks on the moors, the young girl who’s behaving strangely (is she possessed?), the spooked animals, the pervading smell of rot—but it’s precisely these fabled, well-trodden signals of the supernatural that compound the Endlanders’ own very particular myths, rhymes and songs into a much more unsettling and inscrutable whole ... He never shies from the violence and ruthlessness of nature or the bloody business of farming—descriptions that are nonetheless delivered with a poetic turn of phrase and a real gift for often grisly comparison ... Central to John’s gradual realization of his true place in this unforgiving environment is his understanding of himself as its 'custodian,' not its owner ... This makes for a wonderfully unreliable narrative throughout, a sense that John knows more than he is letting on.
Hurley has a good ear for mystery, turning the woods into a magical but dangerous place ... One gets the sense that the deeper one sinks into the basin of the land the more possibility there is of witchcraft and enchantment, an awareness that provokes excitement and fear in equal parts ... if Hurley could improve on anything it would be in making his central character a little more flesh and blood. He aims for reticence, an introversion that is unsettled by finding himself in a place where childhood memories and his new experiences as a father intersect, but occasionally one longs for him to throw his arms in the air, to raise his voice, to run into the deepest part of the valley and scream until his lungs hurt. Silence can be good in a novel but occasionally one needs the drama of the overturned table, the slapped face or the unexpected act of madness. But it would be ungenerous to suggest that such restraint damages the book unduly for Hurley is a fine writer, with concerns that place him a little to the left of the literary mainstream, a remove that makes him extremely interesting.
It draws as much from children’s fiction, folk music and horror cinema of the 1960s and 70s as it does from more traditionally gothic sources. In addition to supervising his heavy traffic of issues, influences, sly reference and pastiche, Hurley adopts a discursive storytelling method. He is as happy with births, marriages and deaths as he is with hammed-up folk ritual and dialogue that splits the difference between Stella Gibbons and Susan Cooper. At the same time, he is often as parsimonious with backstory—what exactly was 'the Blizzard'? When, exactly, did it happen? Are we to take the devil as real?—as the farmers of the Endlands are with words. As a result, the narrative strands of Devil’s Day can seem unevenly balanced. It’s easy to get lost among them ... Nevertheless, this is a story with pull. Its lively, building sense of evil is thoroughly entangled with the assumptions of the way of life depicted, that apparently timeless relationship of the smallholder and the moor ... The devil flickers and dances in the woods and John Pentecost’s self-deceptions are bared for the reader in a horrific climax.
Devil's Day is a true gothic horror tale with all of the essential elements present ... a slow burn of a novel that sneaks up on you at times and yells 'boo!' only to retreat again into the background. The themes of guilt intertwined with family history are inescapable, and readers are helpless to do anything more than read on as the inevitable payment is taken from the Pentecost family for all of their alleged sins. This very well-written book is just perfect for a spooky Halloween night.
Horror is a melodramatic genre and it takes a gifted writer to frighten the reader in any truly visceral way. It's hard to say quite how Andrew Michael Hurley does it but this novel is genuinely creepy. It starts out as a sort of high-culture Cold Comfort Farm without the jokes and the quaint rural traditions of the people in 'the valley' being gently mocked, but quickly morphs into something stronger and stranger, and the reader is sucked into a world in which the devil seems simple and real.
Devil’s Day is a slow-burn of a novel, horrors—both spectral and human—gradually emerging from mists of memory and myth. Characters are built slowly and convincingly as readers come to understand the life of the land and its relationship with the people who work it, time slipping and shifting from past to future, the present little more than a nebulous, amorphous way-station in the passage of ages. Devil’s Day is a novel that requires—and rewards—close reading as Hurley builds an entire world, familiar and mysterious, warm and dank, human and something distinctly, distressingly, other.
Hurley's second novel...is poetically written and heavily detailed; however, it's greatly focused on setting and atmosphere, leaving the character development lacking. Also, John's omniscient narrative is distracting at times, as it's delivered from some point in the future ... While not as gripping as The Loney, the work's dark tone and slow buildup of suspense will still interest readers of gothic fiction.
One story begets another, some of them painful, in this atmospheric account of three landholding families battling the vagaries of the natural and the supernatural on the Endlands, in the rugged Lancashire moors ... Hurley...seamlessly weaves in backstory and fleshes out accounts of the isolated rural life and the horror it seems to engender ... Like Hurley’s celebrated debut, this beautifully told gothic story of love, obligation, and legacy blends genres superbly. Hurley is considered one of the leading figures in what is called the British folk-horror revival.
A century-old folk legend...colors the haunting events of this masterly thriller ... Hurley keeps the explanations for what occurs deliciously ambiguous, filtering discoveries through John, who, as he selectively relates past memories to present happenings, reveals himself to be a less-than-forthcoming narrator at best. The result is an intensely suspenseful tale memorable for what it says about unshakable traditions that are bred in the bone.
...compelling ... Hurley explores the mysteries of human behavior and how they might explain strange events—not to mention the evil that men do—better than demonic influence. He delivers all this with consistently strong scenes, a few fine surprises, and good writing that often sparkles ... A complex and highly satisfying work.
