When the remains of a young child are discovered during a winter storm on a stretch of the bleak Lancashire coastline known as the Loney, a man named Smith is forced to confront the terrifying and mysterious events that occurred forty years earlier when he visited the place as a boy.
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.
