Fans of Shirley Jackson are sure to savor Andrew Michael Hurley’s Gothic horror novel The Loney...Tight, suspenseful writing makes this masterful novel unsettling in the most compelling way.
Throughout their travails, the Loney takes on a life of its own, brooding and powerful, becoming the one character in Andrew Michael Hurley’s dark tale that will not be ignored ... This impressive first novel is luxuriously written, with dialogue springing from richly developed characters. The Loney has won awards and accolades from such reviewers as horror master Stephen King and won the Costa First Novel Award, among other distinctions. Nothing about it disappoints.
The weather of The Loney is English — overcast, thick with ambiguity — and when the heavens open nothing can protect you. It’s an atmosphere for ghosts, for slaughtered animals, for pagan rituals, but Hurley, unexpectedly, uses this lowering horror-movie place as the setting for a serious drama about the nature of faith. The terrors of this novel feel timeless, almost biblical: There are abominations here, and miracles.
...this vibrantly written slow-burn tale would not come close to overtaking a horse. Even at midpoint, the reader is left to wonder if the book is a horror story or a drama. But fright fans can relax—or, rather, they can’t. Hurley’s debut contains dark, unexpected depths, which only really reveal themselves long after his evocative prose has led you far from shore.
The Loney is a wonderful, wholly engrossing debut from an author who is sure to keep his place on the map of current weird fiction heavy-hitters...Put another way, The Loney belongs to the Gothic tradition of supernatural storytelling, and it is a genuine standout even among its more hallmark titles.
