In this modern English folk tale of a family’s grim legacy, writer Andrew Michael Hurley has created an exquisite nightmare.
When one is English, one grows up with the dark past biting at your ankles, a past where fairies and witches fought Vikings and Britons, where Pagans built unexplained structures to worship animals or the stars. It is a past that is soaked in blood and fire and earth, and it is impossible to walk into the countryside anywhere on the island without feeling that pull in your bones.
Seventies England was probably the last bastion of old traditions in England. As kids we’d go out to the fields and graveyards on the first of May to practice the ritual of the Maypole, coal-faced Morris Dancers chasing us with sheep’s stomachs on sticks while our queen declared a holiday from her throne like ancient Briton queens had, while Druids to this day worship the Sun at Stonehenge and Avebury. You can see the places the witches were burned, the gallows and stocks still stand. Many towns still holds these rituals, these markings of nature, just in case the superstitions are real.
This is Andrew Michael Hurley’s setting for Starve Acre, where in the vast and brutal landscape of the Yorkshire Dales, like a pre-Thatcher TV drama, a young couple, Juliette and Richard mourn the sudden death of their young son Ewan, all the time haunted with Richard’s academic work to excavate an ancient gallows tree where an evil man known as Jack Grey was hanged, somewhere on his own land. While Juliette deals with extreme grief by making recordings in Ewan’s bedroom at night imagining he is alive, Richard finds comfort in his discovery of a full, perfect skeleton of a hare buried under the tree, which he is compelled to take into his office and study carefully.
So far not so weird. But it is here that the story plunges the reader into a magical world that seems to feed parasitically off of the seemingly normal one around them and literally comes alive. While the Church has played a part in the history of the land, clashing with ‘old ways’ of the country folk, justice is dealt out blind and hard by the land itself as Ewan is revealed to have been an uncontrollably violent child who readily played into his own fate — and creepily, that of Jack Grey.
This story is beautiful in its ugliness, glorious in its darkness, and revels in its brilliant uncovering of layers. A story you think you know is turned on its head, only to have another revealed, as if we are glaring through many points of view, and many fairy hells, until the raw last page, still throbbing in the trees, and we follow. A masterpiece of English horror.
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Ultimately disappointed. So many threads left unfinished and unexplained. The ending rather sudden and cliched. Promised much but tidbit develop enough. What was it the spriritulists revealed to Juliette. What was the point of digging for the tree remains and so what that a tree limb with hanging rope Mark’s is unearthed. Is the hare brought back to life meant to be the dead son? Etc