STARVE ACRE by Andrew Michael Hurley, reviewed by Adèle Geras

'The last scene is one that you will not ever forget. I guarantee this. Please, if you’re the kind of reader who does this, do not turn to the end first. Please …'

Adèle Geras is the author of many books for children and six novels for adults. Her seventh novel, Conviction, will appear in early 2021 published by Michael Joseph under the pseudonym, Hope Adams. She lives in Cambridge.

Andrew Michael Hurley has written three short novels. They’re all disturbing but this latest is the most worrying of all.

His work is not to everyone’s taste, and I know one person who actively shudders when she utters the names of his books, but I love them. What most appeals to me is the weaving together of careful, vivid writing about specific places, strange interactions between human beings and other human beings and also between people and …I don’t know what to call it. The Unnatural. The Supernatural. Other Forces. Ghosts. Folk Memory... take your pick. Some reviewers have referred to the genre Hurley writes in as ‘folk horror.’

Starve Acre is short enough to be a novella. Its story would be harrowing even with no supernatural elements. A couple, Richard and Juliette, are recovering from the death of their very young son, Ewan. They’ve moved into a house belonging to Richard’s parents. There’s a field close by called Starve Acre, that no one in the area will even approach. A giant gallows tree grew there long ago. Now, the field is barren. Centuries ago, three young men from the village were hanged there for crimes committed under the influence of Jack Grey, a malign presence, like some kind of devilish Green Man. Everyone shuns the field.

‘Local lore had it that the divine reprisal had not ended with the tree but had spread out across the common in a poisonous ripple, turning the grass black, seeping down into the earth like oil, suffocating the life out of the place.’

But Richard, an academic, assuages his pain at his son’s death by exploring: digging in the field eager to find the roots of that tree. He comes across the skeleton of a hare and takes it carefully home where he puts together the hare’s bones, like some horrid jigsaw puzzle. Juliette spends a great deal of time in what was Ewan’s room, weeping and recording what she’s sure is his voice, his presence. To her, he’s not dead at all, but still in the house. I don’t want to give anything away, but there’s a group of people, led by one Mrs Forde who might be able to help Juliette come to terms with her bereavement. They’re called The Beacons and they’re…. shall we say unusual? Hurley is very good with gatherings of odd people…they appear in all his novels.

We also learn that `Ewan is not just any child. He can’t even be classified as a ‘difficult’ child or one who’s suffering from autism, say. He is very much more than that…

And the hare that Richard has assembled becomes hugely important.

The last scene is one that you will not ever forget. I guarantee this. Please, if you’re the kind of reader who does this, do not turn to the end first. Please…

One reason for reading about tragic events is to give relief to the reader, through what the Greeks called catharsis. The pity and terror you feel for others helps you to confront your own sorrows. But where the pity is mixed with so much horror, it’s harder to be comforted. When the whole is written so powerfully and beautifully, the weight of the prose, and the bringing into your mind of a complete and carefully described landscape is a special kind of pleasure.

I read this book on my Kindle and I see I’ve underlined something…it shows up blue as I go through the pages. This is what it says and it’s a good motto for the whole novel:

‘What you go searching for and what you find aren’t always the same.’

Starve Acre is published by John Murray.

Guest review by Graeme Fife: UNCLE SILAS by Sheridan Le Fanu

"How tricks and illusions undercut a sense of reality, the deliberate attempt to disturb the balance of a rational mind ..."

Graeme Fife has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines, and is now a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography and works of history. Great Cycling Climbs, which brings together his books on the French Alps, is published by Thames and Hudson. He says, 'I urge everyone to buy from their independent bookshop, if they're lucky enough - as I am - to have one nearby. If not, by any means possible to counter the sprawl of the online consumer graball.'

Le Fanu’s best-known novel, Uncle Silas, concludes with what may stand as a central fixation in his work, framed by the protagonist and narrator of the novel, Maud:

‘This world is a parable – the habitation of symbols – the phantoms of spiritual things immortal shown in material shape.’

The statement might read as a lofty philosophical animadversion on Nature’s mysteries and the unexplained phenomena of the universe whereas, in this context, it delves into the darker corners and impulses of the human psyche, the machinations of the unprincipled, the bid to influence, manipulate and subdue the innocent. Deceit, deception, undermining trust become instruments of domination. But…slow down, you horses of the night, we must tread more circumspectly.

Ann Radcliff, author of a number of Gothic novels, ushered in a new genre of fiction which extended interest in the mind’s darker impulses. Sophocles’s introduction of the third character in tragedy, Webster’s obsession with ‘the skull beneath the skin’, Hamlet’s ‘more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy’ laid the groundwork. Romantic poets deepened the theme of spiritual torment and angst, the irresistible lure of ‘the dark tower’, and the Victorian novelists ran riot with all the possibilities that these new areas of insight opened up, from Hogg’s Justified Sinner to the shivery crime novels of Wilkie Collins. Le Fanu is part of that coterie of writers whose work is forged in the inquiry into how tricks and illusions undercut a sense of reality, the deliberate attempt to disturb the balance of a rational mind, a sinister interference with a fragile psyche as a prelude to betrayal, fraud, incarceration, violence.

The effect of these scary workings is to instil terror, causing such a radical shift in the foundation of what a character believes to be so that they cease to have any firm grip on what is actually so. Radcliff draws a distinction between terror – perhaps what the character in the novel experiences – and horror, the effect of that on the reader:

‘Terror and Horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them.’ (On the Supernatural)…terror, ‘dread, fright,’ and horror, the bristling of nape hairs.

Le Fanu is a master at inciting both.

Maud, protected by a reclusive, gloomy father, is a motherless heiress. She tells the story of how she comes to live in the remote Derbyshire home of her uncle, Silas, once a notorious rake, now converted to pious Christianity. And which does she see? Who he was or who he has become? The household is also home to a dissolute male cousin, a simpleton of a female cousin, a dodgy servant with a peg leg, a virago of a French governess. The sombre mansion, Bartram-Haugh, in vast parkland - mists at dawn and dusk, eerie noises and flitting movements, essentials of Le Fanu’s atmospherics – contributes to the vivid painting of scene, a very cinematic trope, much favoured in fiction of the time. There was fog, they used fog. And fog as symbol, because the conspiracy to deprive Maud of her wealth hinges on befogging her so that she is at sea, uncertain of where solid grounding is.

Her father dies. Now she is alone and unprotected, tied by a promise to remain a guest of Silas for three and a half years, until she achieves her maturity. If she dies in that time, the money goes to Silas. Her father appears to her in a dream (hallucination?):

‘This night my dear father’s face troubled me – sometimes white and sharp as ivory, sometimes strangely transparent like glass, sometimes all hanging in cadaverous folds, always with the same unnatural expression of diabolical fury. From this dreadful vision I could only escape by sitting up and staring at the light.’

She does, eventually, fall asleep, but in a dream hears her father’s voice, distinctly ‘outside the bed-curtain: “Maud, we shall be late at Bartram-Haugh.”’

Outside the bed-curtain…she’s confined in a four-poster, vulnerable, a prey to what prowls beyond it, and now what is she to believe of what she sees and hears? There is even passing reference to Bluebeard at one point.

Forewarned by whisper, enigmatic comment and her own intuition, she manages to evade the attempt to overpower her – with drugged claret – and watches, from a hiding place, the murder of a victim intended to be her.

It ends…but you must see how, and then move on, perhaps, to Wylders Hand.

Uncle Silas is published by Penguin Classics; Wylders Hand is published by Clean Bright Classics.