Starve Acre by Andrew Michael Hurley
Starve Acre is Hurley’s third novel and he is continuing to till the fields of English Gothic creepiness.
His first, The Loney, 2014, was set on a less than hospitable bit of the Lancashire coast, both in terms of terrain and populace, and involves religious mania, un friendly locals with secrets and a mysterious girl. The author invokes to great effect the sense of the uncanny and keeps the reader guessing as to what is real and what just might be unreal.
His second, Devil’s Day,2017, is again set in the North-West, this time inland on the Lancashire Yorkshire border. In this remote area on the edge of the Pennines people have kept the ‘old ways’ alive. Adam Pentecost returns to the back of beyond farm he was raised on with his pregnant South-of-England wife. Back to a life he thought he escaped from. Again, many of the classic Gothic trope boxes are satisfactorily ticked. And again, the reader is kept in a state of uncertainty about the actuality of the supernatural.
Starve Acre, 2019, shares some similarities with Devil’s Day. The rural setting in the North-West, the return of the protagonist with an outsider spouse to a house in a remote situation and a delving into British folklore. In this new novel, however, Hurley has moved beyond the ambiguous qualities of his previous work and more fully embraces the supernatural.
The story is exploration grief induced madness and resulting obsessive behavior. There is a gradual reveal involved, which given this isn’t a particularly long novel, quite skillfully pulled off.
One of the pleasures of Hurley’s stories is spotting the influences and references to other Gothic tales. In this case, what came immediately to mind was Daphne du Maurier’s short story about the grief of losing a child, Don’t Look Now. Or rather the 1973 film loosely based on it. In fact, though it takes some guessing, Hurley seems to have set his tale in the early 1970’s. There is, as well, a quite cinematographic feel to this novel and, not unsurprisingly, it’s been optioned for filming.
Published in paperback by John Murray at £8.99