The Loney

By Andrew Michael Hurley

Hailed as “a masterful excursion into terror” by the Sunday Times—the eerie, suspenseful debut novel from the author of Devil’s Day and Starve Acre.

Winner of the Costa First Novel Award
A Best Book of the Year, London Times and Daily Mail

“The terrors of this novel feel timeless . . . There are abominations here, and miracles.”—New York Times Book Review

“An amazing piece of fiction.”—Stephen King

“Completely terrifying.”—Paula Hawkins

“Vibrantly written.” —Entertainment Weekly

“Stunning” —Jeff VanderMeer

When Smith was a boy, he and his family went on an Easter pilgrimage with their local parish to the Loney, a bleak stretch of the English coastline, to visit an ancient shrine in search of healing for Smith’s disabled brother. But the locals were none too pleased to welcome them, and the two brothers soon became entangled in a troubling morass of dangerous rituals.

For years after, Smith carries the burden of what happened that spring. And when he hears that the body of a young child has been found during a storm at the Loney, he’s forced to finally reckon with his darkest secrets—and the terror they carry with them.
“The masterpiece by which Hurley will enter the Guild of the Gothic”—Guardian

“Fans of Shirley Jackson are sure to savor . . . Tight, suspenseful writing makes this masterful novel unsettling in the most compelling way.”—Washington Post

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: May 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9780544746817

Andrew Michael Hurley

ANDREW MICHAEL HURLEY lives in Lancashire, where he teaches English literature and creative writing. He has published two short story collections. His first novel, The Loney, won the Costa First Book Award, was short-listed for the James Herbert Award, and was published in twenty territories.

Book preview

First Mariner Books edition 2017

First U.S. edition

Copyright © 2014 by Andrew Michael Hurley

Reading Group Guide Questions and Discussion Points copyright © 2017 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

Nature, Faith, and Horror copyright © 2017 by Andrew Michael Hurley

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

hmhco.com

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Tartarus Press

Published in 2015 in Great Britain by John Murray, a Hachette UK Company

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hurley, Andrew Michael, (date) author.

Title: The Loney / Andrew Michael Hurley.

Description: First U.S. edition. | Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016. | "2014 Identifiers: LCCN 2015037655 | ISBN 9780544746527 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780544746817 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544947191 (pbk.)

Subjects: LCSH: Rites and ceremonies—England—Fiction. | Catholic Church—England—Fiction. | Interpersonal relations—Fiction. | Psychological fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Horror. | FICTION / Family Life. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction. | Suspense fiction.

Classification: LCC PR6108.U6 L66 2016 | DDC 823/.92—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015037655

Cover photographs © Shutterstock

Author photograph © Jonathan Bean/Writers Pictures

v4.0818

For Ray and Rosalie

While they were going out, a man who was demon-possessed and could not talk was brought to Jesus. And when the demon was driven out, the man who had been mute spoke. The crowd was amazed and said, ‘Nothing like this has ever been seen in Israel.’ But the Pharisees said, ‘It is by the prince of demons that he drives out demons.’

—Matthew 9:32–34

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

—W. B. Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’

1

IT HAD CERTAINLY been a wild end to the autumn. On the Heath a gale stripped the glorious blaze of colour from Kenwood to Parliament Hill in a matter of hours, leaving several old oaks and beeches dead. Mist and silence followed and then, after a few days, there was only the smell of rotting and bonfires.

I spent so long there with my notebook one afternoon noting down all that had fallen that I missed my session with Doctor Baxter. He told me not to worry. About the appointment or the trees. Both he and Nature would recover. Things were never as bad as they seemed.

I suppose he was right in a way. We’d been let off lightly. In the north, train lines had been submerged and whole villages swamped by brown river water. There had been pictures of folk bailing out their living rooms, dead cattle floating down an A road. Then, latterly, the news about the sudden landslide on Coldbarrow, and the baby they’d found tumbled down with the old house at the foot of the cliffs.

Coldbarrow. There was a name I hadn’t heard for a long time. Not for thirty years. No one I knew mentioned it any more and I’d tried very hard to forget it myself. But I suppose I always knew that what happened there wouldn’t stay hidden forever, no matter how much I wanted it to.

I lay down on my bed and thought about calling Hanny, wondering if he too had seen the news and whether it meant anything to him. I’d never really asked him what he remembered about the place. But what I would say, where I would begin, I didn’t know. And in any case he was a difficult man to get hold of. The church kept him so busy that he was always out ministering to the old and infirm or fulfilling his duties to one committee or another. I could hardly leave a message, not about this.

His book was on the shelf with the old paperbacks I’d been meaning to donate to the charity shop for years. I took it down and ran my finger over the embossed lettering of the title and then looked at the back cover. Hanny and Caroline in matching white shirts and the two boys, Michael and Peter, grinning and freckled, enclosed in their parents’ arms. The happy family of Pastor Andrew Smith.

The book had been published almost a decade ago now and the boys had grown up—Michael was starting in the upper sixth at Cardinal Hume and Peter was in his final year at Corpus Christi—but Hanny and Caroline looked much the same then as they did now. Youthful, settled, in love.

I went to put the book back on the shelf and noticed that there were some newspaper cuttings inside the dust jacket. Hanny visiting a hospice in Guildford. A review of his book in the Evening Standard. The Guardian interview that had really thrust him into the limelight. And the clipping from an American evangelical magazine when he’d gone over to do the Southern university circuit.

The success of My Second Life with God had taken everyone by surprise, not least Hanny himself. It was one of those books that—how did they put it in the paper?—captured the imagination, summed up the zeitgeist. That kind of thing. I suppose there must have been something in it that people liked. It had bounced around the top twenty of the bestsellers list for months and made his publisher a small fortune.

Everyone had heard of Pastor Smith even if they hadn’t read his book. And now, with the news from Coldbarrow, it seemed likely that they would be hearing of him again unless I got everything down on paper and struck the first blow, so to speak.

2

IF IT HAD another name, I never knew, but the locals called it the Loney—that strange nowhere between the Wyre and the Lune where Hanny and I went every Easter time with Mummer, Farther, Mr and Mrs Belderboss and Father Wilfred, the parish priest. It was our week of penitence and prayer in which we would make our confessions, visit Saint Anne’s shrine, and look for God in the emerging springtime, that, when it came, was hardly a spring at all; nothing so vibrant and effusive. It was more the soggy afterbirth of winter.

Dull and featureless it may have looked, but the Loney was a dangerous place. A wild and useless length of English coastline. A dead mouth of a bay that filled and emptied twice a day and made Coldbarrow—a desolate spit of land a mile off the coast—into an island. The tides could come in quicker than a horse could run and every year a few people drowned. Unlucky fishermen were blown off course and ran aground. Opportunist cocklepickers, ignorant of what they were dealing with, drove their trucks onto the sands at low tide and washed up weeks later with green faces and skin like lint.

Sometimes these tragedies made the news, but there was such an inevitability about the Loney’s cruelty that more often than not these souls went unremembered to join the countless others that had perished there over the centuries in trying to tame the place. The evidence of old industry was everywhere: breakwaters had been mashed to gravel by storms, jetties abandoned in the sludge and all that remained of the old causeway to Coldbarrow was a line of rotten black posts that gradually disappeared under the mud. And there were other, more mysterious structures—remnants of jerry-built shacks where they had once gutted mackerel for the markets inland, beacons with rusting fire-braces, the stump of a wooden lighthouse on the headland that had guided sailors and shepherds through the fickle shift of the sands.

But it was impossible to truly know the Loney. It changed with each influx and retreat of water and the neap tides would reveal the skeletons of those who thought they had read the place well enough to escape its insidious currents. There were animals, people sometimes, the remains of both once—a drover and his sheep cut off and drowned on the old crossing from Cumbria. And now, since their death, for a century or more, the Loney had been pushing their bones back inland, as if it were proving a point.

No one with any knowledge of the place ever went near the water. No one apart from us and Billy Tapper, that is.

Billy was a local drunk. Everyone knew him. His fall from grace to failure was fixed like the weather into the mythology of the place, and he was nothing short of a gift to people like Mummer and Father Wilfred, who used him as shorthand for what drink could do to a man. Billy Tapper wasn’t a person, but a punishment.

Legend had it that he had been a music teacher at a boys’ grammar school, or the head of a girls’ school in Scotland, or down south, or in Hull, somewhere, anywhere. His history varied from person to person, but that the drink had sent him mad was universally accepted and there were any number of stories about his eccentricities. He lived in a cave. He had killed someone in Whitehaven with a hammer. He had a daughter somewhere. He thought that collecting certain combinations of stones and shells made him invisible and would often stagger into the Bell and Anchor in Little Hagby, his pockets chinking with shingle, and try to drink from other people’s glasses, thinking that they couldn’t see him. Hence the dented nose.

I wasn’t sure how much of it was true, but it didn’t matter. Once you’d seen Billy Tapper, anything they said about him seemed possible.

We first met him in the pebble-dashed concrete bus stop on the one road that skirted the coastline from Morecambe down to Knott End. It would have been 1973, when I was twelve and Hanny sixteen. Farther wasn’t with us. He had gone out early with Father Wilfred and Mr and Mrs Belderboss to look at the stained glass in a village church twenty miles away where there was apparently a magnificent Gothic Revival window of Jesus calming the waters. And so Mummer had decided to take Hanny and me to Lancaster to stock up on food and visit an exhibition of old Psalters at the library—for Mummer never missed an opportunity to instruct us on the history of our faith. It looked like Billy was going the same way from the piece of cardboard strung around his neck—one of the several dozen that made it easy for the bus drivers to know where he was supposed to be going.

The other places he’d either been to or might need to visit revealed themselves as he stirred in his sleep. Kendal. Preston. Manchester. Hull. The last being where his sister lived, according to the square of bright red card that was attached to a separate shoestring necklace and contained information that might prove invaluable in an emergency, with his name, his sister’s telephone number and a note in block capitals that he was allergic to penicillin.

This particular fact intrigued me as a child, and I wondered what would happen if he was given penicillin, whether it could possibly damage him any more than he had damaged himself already. I’d never seen a man be so unkind to his own body. His fingers and his palms were shattered with filth. Every crease and line was brown. Either side of his broken nose his eyes were twisted deep down into his skull. His hair crawled past his ears and down his neck, which had turned sea-coloured with dozens of tattoos. There was something faintly heroic about his refusal to wash, I thought, when Hanny and I were so regularly scrubbed and towelled by Mummer.

He slumped on the bench, with an empty bottle of something evil lying on its side on the floor and a small, mouldy-looking potato in his lap that comforted me in a strange way. It seemed right that he should only have a raw potato. It was the kind of thing I assumed down-and-outs ate, nibbling at it bit by bit over weeks as they roamed the highways and byways looking for the next. Hitching lifts. Stealing what they could. Stowing away on trains. As I say, vagrancy wasn’t entirely without its romance to me at that age.

He talked to himself in his sleep, scrunching his pockets—which, like everyone said, sounded as if they were full of stones—complaining bitterly about someone called O’Leary who owed him money and had never given it back to him, even though he owned a horse. When he woke up and noticed we were there he tried his best to be courteous and sober, offering a grin of three or four twisted black teeth and doffing his beret at Mummer, who smiled briefly but, as she managed to do with all strangers, got the measure of him instantly, and sat in a half-revolted, half-fearful silence, willing the bus to come by staring down the empty road.

Like most drunks, Billy bypassed the small talk and slapped his bleeding, broken heart into my palm like a lump of raw beef.

‘Don’t get taken in by the demon drink, lads. I’ve lost everything ’cause of this stuff,’ he said as he held up the bottle and swilled the dregs. ‘See that scar?’

He raised his hand and shook his sleeve down. A red seam ran from his wrist to his elbow, threading its way through tattoos of daggers and melon-chested girls.

‘D’you know how I got that?’

I shook my head. Hanny stared.

‘Fell off a roof. Bone ripped right through it,’ he said and used his finger to demonstrate the angle at which his ulna had protruded.

‘Have you got a spare fag?’

I shook my head again and he sighed.

‘Bollocks. I knew I should have stayed at Catterick,’ came another non sequitur.

It was difficult to tell—and he looked nothing like the ruggedly handsome veterans that popped up in my Commando comics all the time—but I guessed that he must have been of an age to have fought in the war. And sure enough, when he doubled up in a coughing fit and took off his beret to wipe his mouth, it had some cockeyed metal, military insignia on the front.

I wondered if that was what had set him onto the booze, the war. It had done strange things to some people, so Farther said. Knocked their compasses out of whack, as it were.

Whatever the reason, Hanny and I couldn’t take our eyes off him. We gorged ourselves on his dirtiness, on his brutal, alien smell. It was the same fearful excitement we felt when we happened to drive through what Mummer considered a bad part of London and found ourselves lost in a maze of terraces that sat shoulder to shoulder with industrial plants and scrapyards. We would turn in our seats and gawp out of the windows at the scruffy, staring children who had no toys but the bits of wood and metal torn off the broken furniture in their front yards where aproned women stood and screeched obscenities at the men stumbling out of corner pubs. It was a safari park of degradation. What a world without God looked like.

Billy glanced at Mummer and, keeping his eyes on her, he reached down into the plastic bag by his feet and brought out a few tatty bits of paper, which he pressed into my hand. They had been ripped out of a dirty magazine.

He winked at me and settled himself back against the wall. The bus appeared and Mummer stood up and held out her hand to stop it and I quickly stuffed the pictures away.

‘What are you doing?’ said Mummer.

‘Nothing.’

‘Well, stop messing about and get Andrew ready.’

I started trying to coax Hanny into standing so that we could get on the bus, but he wouldn’t move. He was smiling and looking past me at Billy, who by this time had fallen asleep again.

‘What is it, Hanny?’

He looked at me and then back at Billy. Then I understood what he was staring at: Billy wasn’t holding a potato, but his penis.

The bus stopped and we got on. The driver looked past us and whistled at Billy but he didn’t wake up. After another go, the driver shook his head and pressed the button which drew the door closed. We sat down and watched the front of Billy’s trousers darken. Mummer tutted and peeled our faces away from the window to look at her instead.

‘Be warned,’ she said, as the bus pulled away. ‘That man is already inside you. It won’t take more than a few wrong choices to bring him out, believe me.’

She held her handbag on her lap and looked straight ahead. I clutched the dirty pictures tight in one hand and slipped the other inside my coat and pressed my stomach hard with my fingertips, trying to find the kernel of badness that only needed the right conditions of godlessness and depravity for it to germinate and spread like a weed.

It happened so easily. Drink quickly possessed a man and made him its servant. Father Wilfred always said so.

When Mummer told him about Billy later that evening, he simply shook his head and sighed.

‘What can one expect of a man like that, Mrs Smith? Someone so removed from God.’

‘I said to the boys that they ought to take note,’ said Mummer.

‘And rightly so,’ he said, taking off his glasses and looking at Hanny and me as he polished them on his sleeve. ‘They should make it their business to know all the poisons that Satan peddles.’

‘I feel rather sorry for him,’ said Mrs Belderboss.

‘So do I,’ said Farther.

Father Wilfred put his glasses back on and raised a brief, condescending smile.

‘Then you’ll be adding to his already brimming store. Pity is the only thing a drunk has in abundance.’

‘Still, he must have had an awfully hard life to have got himself into such a state,’ Mrs Belderboss said.

Father Wilfred scoffed. ‘I don’t think he knows the meaning of a hard life. I’m sure my brother could tell you as many tales as I could about real poverty, real struggle, couldn’t you, Reginald?’

Mr Belderboss nodded. ‘Everyone had it tough in Whitechapel,’ he said. ‘No work. Kiddies starving.’

Mrs Belderboss touched her husband’s arm in sympathy. Father Wilfred sat back and wiped his mouth with a napkin.

‘No, a man like that is the worst kind of fool,’ he said. ‘He’s thrown everything away. All his privileges and opportunities. He was a professional, I believe. A teacher. What a terrible waste.’

It’s odd, but when I was a child there were certain things that were so clear to me and their outcomes so inevitable that I thought I had a kind of sixth sense. A gift of foresight, like that of Elijah or Ezekiel, who had predicted drought and destruction with such unsettling accuracy.

I remember Hanny once swinging over a pond on the Heath and knowing, knowing, that the rope would break, which it did; like I knew that the stray cat he brought back from the park would end up minced on the tube line, and that he would drop the bowl of goldfish he’d won at the fair on the kitchen floor as soon as we got home.

In the same way, I knew after that conversation around the dinner table that Billy was going to die soon. The thought came to me as an established fact; as though it had already come to pass. No one could live like that for long. Being that filthy took so much effort that I was sure that the same merciful God who sent a whale to save Jonah and gave Noah a nod about the weather would put him out of his misery.

3

THAT EASTER WAS the last time we went to the Loney for several years.

After the evening when he’d set us straight about Billy Tapper over supper, Father Wilfred changed in a way that no one could quite explain or understand. They put it down to him getting too old for the whole thing—after all it was a long journey up from London and the pressure of being shepherd to his flock during such an intense week of prayer and reflection was enough to wear out a man half his age. He was tired. That was all.

But as I had the uncanny knack of sensing the truth about things, I knew that it was something far more than that. There was something very wrong.

After the conversation about Billy had petered out and everyone had settled in the living room, he’d walked down to the beach and come back a different man. Distracted. Rattled by something. He complained rather unconvincingly of a stomach upset and went to lie down, locking his door with an emphatic swipe of the bolt. A little while later I heard noises coming from his room, and I realised he was crying. I’d never heard a man cry before, except for one of the mentally disadvantaged lot that came to do crafts at the parish hall once a fortnight with Mummer and some of the other ladies. It was a noise of fear and despair.

The next morning when he finally rose, dishevelled and still agitated, he muttered something about the sea and went out with his camera before anyone could ask him what was wrong. It wasn’t like him to be so offhand. Nor for him to sleep in so late. He wasn’t himself at all.

Everyone watched him walking down the lane and decided it was best to leave as soon as possible, convinced that once he was back at Saint Jude’s he would quickly recover.

But when we returned home, his mood of fretfulness barely altered. In his sermons he seemed more worked up than ever about the ubiquitous evils of the world and any mention of the pilgrimage cast a shadow over his face and sent him into a kind of anxious daydream. After a while no one talked about going there any more. It was just something that we used to do.

Life pulled us along and we forgot about the Loney until 1976 when Father Wilfred died suddenly in the new year and Father Bernard McGill was relocated from some violent parish in New Cross to take on Saint Jude’s in his stead.

After his inaugural Mass, at which the bishop presented him to the congregation, we had tea and cakes on the presbytery lawn so that Father Bernard could meet his parishioners in a less formal setting.

He ingratiated himself straight away and seemed at ease with everyone. He had that way about him. An easy charm that made the old boys laugh and the women unconsciously preen themselves.

As he went from group to group, the bishop wandered over to Mummer and me, trying to eat a large piece of Dundee cake in as dignified a manner as possible. He had taken off his robes and his surplice but kept on his plum-coloured cassock, so that he stood out amongst the browns and greys of the civilians as a man of importance.

‘He seems nice, your Grace,’ said Mummer.

‘Indeed,’ the bishop replied in his Midlothian accent that for some reason always made me think of wet moss.

He watched Father Bernard send Mr Belderboss into fits of laughter.

‘He performed wonders to behold in his last parish.’

‘Oh, really?’ said Mummer.

‘Very good at encouraging the young folk to attend,’ the bishop said, looking at me with the specious grin of a teacher who wishes to punish and befriend in equal measure and ends up doing neither.

‘Oh, my lad’s an altar boy, your Grace,’ Mummer replied.

‘Is he?’ said the bishop. ‘Well, good show. Father Bernard’s quite at home with the teens as well as the more mature members of the congregation.’

‘Well, if he comes on your recommendation, your Grace, I’m sure he’ll do well,’ said Mummer.

‘Oh, I don’t doubt it,’ the bishop replied, brushing crumbs off his stomach with the back of his hand. ‘He’ll be able to steer you all through safe waters, make good around the capes, as it were. In fact my sailing analogy is quite apt,’ he said, looking into the middle distance and awarding himself a smile. ‘You see, I’m rather keen on Father Bernard taking the congregation out into the wider world. I don’t know about you but I’m of the opinion that if one is cosseted by the familiar, faith becomes stagnant.’

‘Well, if you think so, your Grace,’ said Mummer.

The bishop turned to Mummer and smiled in that self-satisfied way again.

‘Do I detect that there may be some resistance to the idea, Mrs . . . ?’

‘Smith,’ she said, then, seeing that the bishop was waiting for her to answer, she went on. ‘Perhaps there might be, your Grace, among the older members. They’re not keen on things changing.’

‘Nor should they be, Mrs Smith. Nor should they be,’ he said. ‘Rest assured, I rather like to think of the appointment of a new incumbent as an organic process; a new shoot off the old vine, if you like; a continuum rather than a revolution. And in any case I wasn’t suggesting that you went off to the far-flung corners of the earth. I was thinking of Father Bernard taking a group away on a retreat at Easter time. It was a tradition that I know was very dear to Wilfred’s heart, and one that I always thought worthwhile myself.

‘It’d be a nice way to remember him,’ he added. ‘And a chance to look forward to the future. A continuum, Mrs Smith, as I say.’

The sound of someone knocking a knife against a glass started to rise over the babble in the garden.

‘Ah, you’ll have to excuse me, I’m afraid,’ said the bishop, dabbing crumbs from his lips. ‘Duty calls.’

He went off towards the trestle table that had been set up by the rose bushes, his cassock flapping around his ankles and getting wet.

When he had gone, Mrs Belderboss appeared at Mummer’s side.

‘You were having a long chat with the bishop,’ she said, nudging Mummer playfully in the arm. ‘What were you talking about?’

Mummer smiled. ‘I have some wonderful news,’ she said.

A few weeks later, Mummer organised a meeting of interested parties so as to get the ball rolling before the bishop could change his mind, as he was wont to do. She suggested that everyone come to our house to discuss where they might go, although Mummer had only one place in mind.

On the night she had set aside, they came in out of the rain, smelling of the damp and their dinners: Mr and Mrs Belderboss, and Miss Bunce, the presbytery housekeeper, and her fiancé, David Hobbs. They hung up their coats in the little porch with its cracked tiles and its intractable odour of feet and gathered in our front room anxiously watching the clock on the mantelpiece, with the tea things all set out, unable to relax until Father Bernard arrived.

Eventually, the bell went and everyone got to their feet as Mummer opened the door. Father Bernard stood there with his shoulders hunched in the rain.

‘Come in, come in,’ said Mummer.

‘Thank you, Mrs Smith.’

‘Are you well, Father?’ she said. ‘You’re not too wet I hope.’

‘No, no, Mrs Smith,’ said Father Bernard, his feet squelching inside his shoes. ‘I like the rain.’

Unsure if he was being sarcastic, Mummer’s smile wavered a little. It wasn’t a trait she knew in priests. Father Wilfred had never been anything other than deadly serious.

‘Good for the flowers,’ was all she could offer.

‘Aye,’ said Father Bernard.

He looked back at his car.

‘I wonder, Mrs Smith, how you’d feel about me bringing in Monro. He doesn’t like being on his own and the rain on the roof sends him a wee bit crackers, you know.’

‘Monro?’ said Mummer, peering past him.

‘After Matt.’

‘Matt?’

‘Matt Monro,’ said Father Bernard. ‘My one and only vice, Mrs Smith, I can assure you. I’ve had long consultations with the Lord about it, but I think He’s given me up as a lost cause.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Mummer. ‘Who are you talking about?’

‘The daft feller mooning at the window there.’

‘Your dog?’

‘Aye.’

‘Yes,’ said

Reviews for The Loney

[clairefun-979518 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Not my usual read, but I was drawn to the cover and the description, although I ended up being a little disappointed by it. Mostly the story of a boy, his mute older brother, his religious mother and their church friends, going on a religious retreat in the hope of curing the brother. There's flashbacks to the boys earlier days as an altar boy for the previous priest who, according to the boys mother, did everything right unlike the new modern priest with his new fangled ways, and there's a couple of flash forwards to the current day where the boy and his brother are adults and life is different for them. It took a *really* long time to get to the 'point' where these stories converge. If you like an awful lot of religion, belief, masses, etc being described then you'll like this - I'm not a fan. I never found it scary - although the 'scary' characters were fine, but I've seen those sorts of things done so much better - I briefly thought longingly of Margaret Mahy's The Tricksters, where the weird ominous characters infiltrating a family are actually creepy and interesting. Admittedly I didn't really like most of the characters in this, although that's possibly how it's meant to be, the 'new' priest was possibly the most likable of the lot.
Most of the book is about building the characters, I guess, but there's just soooo much where nothing really happens (except religion!) that when you don't like most of the characters, it drags. The ending was the only bit really where anything happened, and it was...fine. A bit of a letdown but fine. WHat I liked most about the book at all was the scene setting, the scenery, the description, - I could picture the area and the atmosphereand the general damp grey miserableness of their temporary home and the run down landscapes surrounding it. I'm not sure I've been to the exact part of the UK it took place, but I know the type, and I've been to plenty, and it was brilliantly evocative. I know others call it gothic and creepy and so on, but it just made me think of some slightly rubbish holidays I've been on when you can't afford to go anywhere half decent, but there's a cheap place to rent in a quiet place in the countryside when you just make the best of it because sometimes it just rains all week and the fog never lifts and that's just what you get...admittedly there was a lot less religious overtones to my rubbish holidays so they were just gloomy english weather!
So overall - great cover, good potential, slow and meandering but a bit of a nothingy story with unlikable 'good religious folk'. Not really for me.

[josephcamilleri-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I had placed this contemporary Gothic novel on my mental to-read list when it was first issued as a limited edition hardback by the specialist Tartarus Press. The initial reviews were promising, and the Wicker-man-like plot premise seemed intriguing - a group of Catholic pilgrims on a retreat in a desolate part of the North-Western English coast where arcane pagan rituals (possibly) survive. The book collector in me is now busily kicking himself for not snapping the book up before it became a mainstream bestseller and a Costa prizewinner.

Now that I've got my hands on a copy (in paperback, alas) I can console myself that it was worth the wait. Yes, this is as good as it has been made out to be, although possibly not for the reasons you were told.

Some reviews have praised the novel's characterisation. I beg to differ. I thought most of the characters remained two-dimensional, despite having rich material worth developing. The dialogue, at times, struck me as too simplistic. The descriptions are altogether more successful. The bleak atmosphere of the Lancashire coast is evoked in prose of lyrical beauty which never ceases to delight. Then again, it must be admitted that to gain effect, Hurley resorts to all the tropes in the Gothic/horror manual, including decaying houses, a preponderance of inclement weather, secret rooms, threatening locals, hints of witchcraft, religious mania... the works.

Where the novel really scores is in its mastery of storytelling. This is the type of superbly paced book which grabs you by the throat from the very first pages, makes you skip meals, keeps you awake at night and then haunts your dreams when you finally switch off the bedside lamp - I read this over the course of a feverish weekend. The really scary parts are few and far between, but the novel is permeated with an uncanny sense of dread which sends shivers down the spine and is hard to dismiss. Days after you finish the book, when its spell starts to wear off, you will start to realise that there were aspects of the story which were not satisfactorily explained, that plot elements which seemed important led nowhere and that the ending was, to be honest, anti-climactic. Strangely, you don't feel this whilst you're immersed in the novel.

Finally, this being a novel about Catholic pilgrims, allow me some comments from the perspective of a Catholic reader. As a fan of classic Gothic literature, with their anti-Catholic sentiment, I was neither surprised nor particularly offended at the negative portrayal of some of the religious characters (primarily Father Wilfred and the narrator's mother or "Mummer", to use her rather sinister petname). What were harder to digest where the suggestions of blasphemous rituals. From the reviews I've read, the novel seemed to leave "secular" readers cold. This leads me to believe that people of a more "religious" bent will likely find certain scenes more shocking (or, if you wish, more effective) - impressionable readers, be prepared. On a more positive note, this novel raises some profound and interesting themes - for instance, should faith lead us to expect or arrogantly "demand" miracles, or should it conversely help us accept with serenity the negative aspects of life? This is a question which the novel explores but leaves unresolved, although it does suggest that convenient short-cuts might have adverse long-term consequences.

To sum up, then, "The Loney" has its share of flaws, but it is an impressively addictive, classy, Gothic page-turner. And even if we don't admit it, we all love page-turners, don't we?

[jessicareadsthings · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Based on a copy from NetGalley.

I enjoyed this one, but it was also sort of baffling. Like, I'm still not sure what happened there at the end bit. But, it was a really great read for a cold, rainy, stay-in-with-tea-all-day sort of day.

[jbd1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Such an atmospheric and creepy gothic tale set in a particularly suitable spot on the English coast. Enjoyed it thoroughly and will continue making my way through Hurley's works.  

[sturlington_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Beautifully written, this novel is suffused with gothic atmosphere. It is set in the 1970s on the sea in England, in a place called the Loney, which is constantly shifting as the tides come in and go out, so it seems both ephemeral and menacing, as the place you are standing could shift under your feet. There are two houses, both very old and incredibly creepy. In one house, a group of Catholic pilgrims are staying, three couples and a priest there for Lent and to visit the local shrine. One couple has two sons, the narrator and his older brother, who is mute and mentally disabled; the parents hope to cure him at the shrine. The other house is across the Loney, sometimes cut off, where the two boys encounter a strange couple and a young pregnant girl. The villagers are acting odd and threatening, weird things are found in the woods, the woods themselves are changing in ways they shouldn't. What is happening here? We are not to really know, not fully.The setting is so well drawn that it suffuses the reader. The characters are equally compelling, as we are gradually drawn into their history and their quest at the Loney. This is a slow burn altogether, and while reading it is a pleasure, the payoff is not all that satisfying. The book has a lot to say about faith and the powers at work in the world, but much of what it has to say is vague, and the reader must make their own way without a lot of landmarks to guide them. What happens at the end, and why, is left very ambiguous--frustratingly so, in my opinion. But we do see the effects of that Easter visit on the two boys when they are grown, especially what has happened to their faith, and I think that is rather the point.Despite these drawbacks, the book is well worth a read just for the strength of its writing. This is the author's first book, and I will be looking for more from him.

[ken5me5old5mate · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Well, I liked it and the setting immensely. The scenes up the coast were evocative, brilliant, inventive, and scary.

The characters were solid and credible. I liked how the story unfolded and was completely immersed in it.

I had a few problems with the end part of the book and won't give spoilers to indicate why because you really should read this book if you get the chance. My minor quibbles are just that.

Read it on a rainy day, curled up with the doors locked.

[daftboy1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is the story set in the Present day. One of the brothers we never know his real name he gets called Tonto when he is young, is remembering the time growing up in the 1970s their Parents are very devout, every year they make a pilgrimage to the Lancashire coast. This is narrated by Tonto who recalls growing up with his brother Andrew nicknamed Hanny who is mute. His very holy Catholic Parents are convinced the power of Prayer will give Hanny his voice. In 1976 along with the new Parish Priest Father Bernard and 2 other Couples they travel up from London to stay at an old cottage called The Moorings the area is locally known as the Loney. The Grown ups are not convinced Father Bernard is up to the job as Parish Priest. They meet some strange locals, the boys go on adventures, they come across a couple acting bizarrely with a teenage Pregnant girl called Else. Hanny falls in love with her. He keeps wanting to go and visit her they take some books from Else and in one of the books there is a lot of money. There are sinister goings on when Hanny and Tonto are taking back to the house were they first met Else they return the money. The baby Else was pregnant with has been born but the baby is all deformed. Hanny is taken to the basement with this baby and shots are fired. We don't know exactly what happened but its cured Hanny he can now speak. Jump to the present day Andrew/Hanny is now a Famous, Successful and Published author, Tonto on the other hand is a bitter and a bit of a loner. There was quite a bit of Coastal erosion near the Loney and a babies body from the 70s has ben discovered.

[piemouth · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Title refers to a dismal marshy part of England. Memories of an annual family trip there during Holy Week, and the narrator's mother's obsession that drinking water at the shrine there will cure his mute brother. Well there is more going on than holy things, there are signs that villagers are still practicing the old ways. It's slowly told, not exactly a ghost story, not exactly crime, and the creepyness is very well done. I liked it a lot.

[linda.a. · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This mesmerising and haunting story is told in flashbacks by the narrator, whom the reader knows by his nickname of Tonto. When he reads news of a child’s body being found on Coldbarrow, situated on the Lancashire coast, disturbing memories come flooding back. As a child he and his brother Hanny were taken, by Mummer, their ultra-religious mother, Farther, their more reasonable father, other parishioners and their elderly parish priest, on an annual Easter pilgrimage to a religious retreat which overlooked the wild coast and an area called The Loney. These visits would culminate in a visit to a Lourdes-like shrine in the hope that Hanny, who was mute and appeared to be mentally disturbed, would be miraculously cured of his affliction. The year which is being recalled in this story is different because the old priest, whose final visit to the Loney had caused him to have a crisis of faith, has died in mysterious circumstances, and has been replaced by a more modern priest. Although his personality is more appealing to the brothers, his approach to religion and to this pilgrimage is seen as being too modern and cheerful to satisfy the mother’s rigid view of faith and belief. The other characters include a group of local people who are, by turns, both helpful and rather threatening, particularly when they engage in pagan rituals; a shady character in a Daimler and a very young, but pregnant teenager, who may or may not be able to perform miracles. The story revolves around the rituals and influence of the Catholic Church and its rigid adherence to tenets of faith, set alongside equally powerful ancient, pagan practices and the even more powerful, unpredictable and ever-shifting forces of nature. I felt mesmerised by this outstanding story from the very start and it never once loosened its grip on my absolute engagement with its slowly developing tension. My own belief in what I was experiencing as the story unfolded was constantly challenged – it felt every bit as unpredictable as the raw power of the sea and the wild coastline which is central to the mood and development of the story. Themes of faith, the desire for miracles, good and evil, paganism and conventional Christian beliefs wound their way through the story in a thought-provoking and, at times, very disturbing way. Then, set against all these themes, was the recognition that there was nothing predictable or controllable about the forces of nature and that the shifting sands would always, in time, reveal any secrets. I found it interesting that, for all her “conventional” faith and her belief in the power of divine intervention, Mummer was prepared to not only tolerate, but also engage in, some of the pagan rituals of the local people. Throughout the story I felt an awareness that, when they were struggling with their faith, people felt a need to “hedge their bets”, to not pass up any opportunity which might make them feel more in control of their situation. I would usually be put off any book which is marketed as “Gothic” but I was persuaded to read The Loney partly because I am very familiar with this part of the Lancashire coast, and because the author was due to speak at a book festival I was due to attend. I am just so pleased that I did because this is one of the best books I have read this year. The subtlety of the writing is impressive and, throughout my reading I felt confident that Andrew Hurley was in total control, not only of his development of this haunting, disturbing story, but in his use of language to convey what he wanted to say. Yes, there are gothic elements, supernatural happenings and moments of terror, particularly later in the story, but these are handled in an impressively skilful way. His style is a masterful example of “show don’t tell”, thus allowing the reader to feel fully engaged throughout; it is this very subtlety which allows the reader’s imagination to take flight, to evoke fear and disturbing uncertainty. In addition to everything else I admired in his elegant writing style, I loved the way in which he evoked so vividly and accurately the ever-changing nature of the sea and the landscape; I really did feel transported to the world his characters were inhabiting and their struggles to adapt to it. In my opinion this is not a conventional horror story, it is much more an exploration of the psychology of people’s belief systems as they attempt to make sense of all those things which challenge their beliefs. I find it remarkable that this is the author’s debut novel so I am now eagerly awaiting his second.I cannot recommend this book highly enough so I hope my enthusiasm will tempt you to read it for yourself!

[coach_of_alva · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A pilgrimage to a shrine with waters that are said to heal leads to a miracle, for sure, but the unreliable narrator leaves the reader uncertain as to what kind, for the ritualistic Catholicism seems cruel and ineffective, the paganism seems cruel but effective, and the temptation of an unforgiving and unappealing naturalism tempts. An atmospheric thoughtful read, with unforgettable portraits of a small community of believers, two brothers, a mad priest, and an apparently God-forsaken place.

[jayne_charles_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This was a wonderfully haunting and atmospheric read. It didn't matter that I didn't understand what went on in the remote cottage on the coast, it was enough to read the beautiful text, and the intelligent commentary, via the characters, on the nature of religion. I only wished the narrator had been named - it's not new or clever any more: this is the second book I've read this year that employed this 'device' and it's only February. One might argue the narrator was hiding his identity in case of legal issues, but he's named his brother and various members of his family and friends, so I don't think Mr Plod would have any difficulty finding him.

[lisapeet · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Such a damp book—water-stained walls and feral tides and rain, rain, rain. This was a good, if slightly opaque, theologically-inclined gothic tale, with scary houses and Satanists and faith being questioned left and right. When I first closed the book I thought the ending was as soggy as the landscape, but after a bit of thought I've decided it was actually very clever, if maybe a bit too subtle for its own good. But all in all the book kept me rapt and appreciative of being dry; a good spooky tale.

[welsh_eileen2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A thrilling debut novel set on a lonely stretch of English coast line where a disparate group of people went on a sort of retreat at Easter.It is a dark modern horror story that had me reading into the night.Very scary!Great read!I was given a digital copy of this book by the publisher John Murray via Netgalley in return for an honest unbiased review.

[misspider-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Ein ungewöhnlicher Roman, der mich vor allem atmosphärisch überzeugt hat. Die karge, kalte Landschaft setzt einen passenden Rahmen für die düstere Geschichte, in der Glaube und Aberglaube, religiöser Fanatismus, Hoffnung und Verzweiflung aufeinander prallen.Der ruhige Ton und die langsame Entwicklung der Handlung laufen Gefahr, von manchen Lesern als langweilig erachtet zu werden. Aber wie heißt es so schön: "Stille Wasser sind tief". Und genau in diesem Sinne hat mich die Geschichte wie ein Sog mitgerissen und ich konnte das Buch nicht mehr aus der Hand legen. Gerade die Unaufgeregtheit der Erzählweise ist es, die das Geschehen noch nachhaltiger wirken lässt und die wenigen Momente, in denen tatsächlich etwas schreckliches passiert, wirken umso eindringlicher auf den Leser.Dieser Schreibstil des Autors (soweit man das bei einer Übersetzung beurteilen kann) hat mich wirklich beeindruckt, so dass ich nach weiteren Werken Ausschau halten werde. Klare Kaufempfehlung!(Ich habe das Buch im Austausch gegen eine ehrliche Rezension erhalten)

[adonisguilfoyle · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

How does the saying go: never buy a book because of the pretty cover? Something like that. The Loney is a strange story very well told, but I was never scared - only disturbed by the crazy Catholic mother intent on 'curing' her mute son and the motley crew of ditherers who accompany her to the Loney, a miserable spit of land on the northeast coast. The main plotline takes place in the 1970s, but the characters and the setting are pure Dickens. Crazy Catholic Mother - or 'Mummer', as the narrator irritatingly refers to her - drags the new parish priest along with her and a set of other weirdos on a pilgrimage to a random shrine in the middle of nowhere, in the hope of making her silent son speak. She is truly off her trolley, yet apart from the odd 'Now then, Esther' type comments, nobody sets her straight. Of course there is a miracle in the offing, but the Loney exacts a cruel price that haunts Mummer's two boys into adulthood. The descriptions of the Loney are beautifully atmospheric, particularly the hidden room at the Moorings house and ancient chapel, but the fog never really cleared for me, I must admit. And the characters irritated me to the point where I started skimming through the crucial pages. Why did Mummer get her miracle, and not - say - committed? Why did everyone else just go along with her (I was siding with Miss Bunce, who wanted to go to Wales)? Good choice of religion, though - Catholicism truly is the stuff of horror novels.

[passion4reading_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Looking back to his childhood in the 1970s, the narrator recounts events surrounding two Easter pilgrimages to the Lancashire coast, several years apart – events that still cast a shadow over the surviving participants ...This is a difficult book to review as it has its heart the contrast between the physical (represented by the Lancashire coastline and Moorings, the group's lodgings) and the immaterial (covering notions like love, faith and belief). This is a book steeped in atmosphere and will find (and has already found) its fair share of critics as, truth be told, not that much happens. When you commit to it, you really have to be in it for the long haul and be willing to go at the author's pace. Andrew Michael Hurley masterfully adds layer upon layer to the proceedings, at the same time that each consecutive chapter reveals further nuances between the small group of pilgrims. Written in beautiful and eloquent prose, the descriptions evoke the bleak Lancashire coastline so that I could almost hear the surf and feel the wind blowing round my reading chair, while almost from the word go pervading the events with a sense of deep unease. It is a dark and disturbing tale, with one scene in particular standing head and shoulders above the rest, and I find myself still thinking about it hours after closing the back cover.I wouldn't exactly call it a masterpiece or a great piece of fiction, but then maybe it's one of those books that call out for a second reading. I can certainly see how it gets its hooks into you.

[dove. · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Lately, I read mostly e-books because it is so much more practical. But, once in a while, I come across a book that deserves to be read slowly, patiently, and on paper; a book that I can make marks on and go back and forth with ease. The Loney is one of those books. The language was beautiful and insightful and I found myself highlighting left and right. The characters are well-defined and nature and religion are so vividly portrayed that they feel like characters unto themselves. This doesn't feel like a book written by a first-time author. I highly recommend it!I received this book from NetGalley for an honest review

[brandiec-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

How to describe Andrew Michael Hurley's The Loney? Some of the adjectives which spring to mind are gothic, eerie, assured, suspenseful, and sinister. The bulk of the book is an extended flashback to a trip the narrator and his mute and intellectually disabled brother Hanny took with Mummer, Farther, their priest, and several fellow parishioners to a creepy house in Lancashire known as Moorings. This particular trip was the last in a series of annual pilgrimages to a shrine at which Mummer believes Hanny will miraculously become "normal." The flashback is prompted by the discovery of a baby's skeleton at Coldbarrow, a second creepy house located not far from Moorings.This opening is much more jolting to the reader than it sounds, because when Hanny is introduced on the first page, he is a respected pastor, author, husband, and father. How he was "cured" is the central mystery of the novel. Was it a miracle from God, as Hanny's bestselling My Second Life with God suggests? Or was it the result of a darker bargain? It is this tension between Mummer's version of Christianity and the ominous atmosphere at Moorings which gives The Loney its power, although Hurley's description of both locations provides a clue:"St. Jude's [the Catholic church attended by the narrator's family in London] was a monstrosity. . . . From the outside it was imposing and gloomy and the thick, hexagonal spire gave it the look of a mill or factory. Indeed, it seemed purpose-built in the same sort of way, with each architectural component carefully designed to churn out obedience, faith or hope in units per week according to demand.. . .I often thought there was too much time there [the Loney]. That the place was sick with it. Haunted by it. Time didn’t leak away as it should. There was nowhere for it to go and no modernity to hurry it along. It collected as the black water did on the marshes and remained and stagnated in the same way."One thing that really struck me was Hurley's selection of names for his places and characters. Take "Mummer," for instance. I am used to the British referring to their mothers as "Mum," but I had never seen "Mummer" used as a name before. A mummer, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is "[a]n actor in a traditional masked mime." Is Mummer's faith an act? What might she be hiding behind that mask? The insular village in which she grew up, with its own language and traditions, was "within spitting distance" of Moorings, Coldbarrow, and the Loney, so perhaps her expectations of the shrine's healing power are not those of the traditional Catholic pilgrim. Nuances like these elevate The Loney above the other horror and mystery novels with which it might be shelved.I received a free copy of The Loney through Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review.

[runner56_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Some of the negative reviews describe this book as "strange" and I would agree with that another candidly states" nothing significant happens, never mind eerie" and a third makes the very unflattering comment "it was like reading a soap" I think that all the negative reviews have entirely missed the point of this astounding work of literary fiction. The story does not have to be fast moving, it does not have to have pages filled with action and movement and it is certainly much more than "a boys story of going on a religious pilgrimage"I was fascinated and enthralled from the first page, as I was transported to a wild, rugged and lonely Lancastrian coast where the quietness and isolation of this god forsaken location instantly created a feeling of dread, fear and approaching evil. The beauty and loneliness of the surroundings was reflected so expertly in the reflective and creative writing style of the author. His command of the English language and his ability to paint a picture by his choice of phrases and words is simply unmatched in anything I have ever read......"Like the shadow of a huge predatory bird, darkness moved slowly down the hillside, past Moorings, across the marshes, across the beach, across the sea, until all that was left was a muddy orange on the horizon as the last of England's light ebbed away.""The wind came rushing in off the sea, sweeping its comb through the scrubby grass and sending a shiver through the vast pools of standing water.""It was an albino, with eyes that looked as if they had been marinated in blood."The narrator (we only ever get to know his nickname Tonto) his brother Hanny together with "Mummer" and "Farther" embark on their annual pilgrimage to a sacred shrine on a desolate strip of coastline known as the Loney. They are hoping that their faith will result in a cure for Hanny who is unable to speak. The Loney is a place of superstition and fear of hauntings and evil amongst a population equally eccentric and unpredictive in their behaviour. The beliefs and religious participation of all the characters we encounter is in wonderful contrast to the "Wicker Man" style rituals that fill the lives of the residents.The horror is not what is said or done but in the implied which creates a magic visionary picture and in the final chapters uncovering a murder that had remained hidden for many years.The Loney is a great example of what is really important in both the writing and reading of a book. A good story should have the ability not only to entertain but to make you feel a part of the events unfolding before you, transporting you from the ordinary and mundane to the intellectual thoughts of the author. I cannot recommend this book highly enough and thanks to the good people of netgalley for the free copy I received in exchange for an honest review, and that is what I have written.

[adrianburke_1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Well, I am struggling. Struggling to finish reading this book and struggling with the opinions of others puffed on the book's cover. 1/2 way through and still nothing except some amateurish hints at skulduggery. Glad I did not buy it. This blooming book. Characters turn up who you don't know. Nothing much happens. Skimpy description to supposedly add foreboding. Why publish?