The Loney: the contemporary classic

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Things lived at the Loney as they ought to live. The wind, the rain, the sea were all in their raw states, always freshly born and feral. Nature got on with itself. Its processes of death and replenishment happened without anyone noticing apart from Hanny and me.” Also this book heavily involves religion and I personally couldn't connect so much to that so it made it even more difficult for me to read. I was raised as a Catholic and I do recall being sent on similar retreats as a child, albeit in less creepy locations than this. This was also in the Seventies and so much of this book did have a certain resonance with me as a reader and I really enjoyed Smith’s ‘voice’ as he explained the relationships between the different characters and the events that led up to the last visit to the Loney and what happened there. Mummer is a difficult woman, who expects Smith to look after his brother and demands that Father Bernard do everything in exactly the same way as Father Wilfred did, and is unforgiving of any deviating from her idea of how things should be. The small group are divided, unhappy and unwelcome. And there is a boy, Andrew, called Hanny. He’s mute and somewhat withdrawn, perhaps autistic though it’s not defined. Every year the group with their priest-guide, father Wilfred, set off to the coastal Loney in kind of pilgrimage, to visit the remotely located sanctuary and pray for cure Andrew. On the spot they used to stay at Moorings, an isolated and rather creepy house. Fantastic, dark read especially for Halloween and for those who are fans of the first season of True Detective, Just finished this for the second, maybe third? time. The slightly freaky build up in the first third has little tidbits you may not really note the first time through, but in hindsight, the first chapters contain foggy clues as to the nature of what is to come.

Postmistress wrote:I totally agree that this book is an enigma but it is hard to decipher whether the inconsistencies result from the unreliable1st person account or just poor editing.... It left me so frustrated. Many readers have heaped praise on Hurley's characterisation but I felt that this was the books biggest weakness and the main reason why the plot felt peppered with irrelevance. The Loney” feels like a perfect read as we ease into Autumn for the tremendous sense of atmosphere and introspection it creates. This could have easily been a more straightforward spooky story of outsiders who stumble into a provincial area ruled by sinister old rituals, but Hurley makes it a much more nuanced and meaningful story than that. It's a novel with a lot of mystery and ambiguity – particularly because it's only told from the narrator's point of view and I gradually began to wonder if he's entirely trustworthy. He asserts towards the end that “Details are truth.” “The Loney” is a novel whose magnificent details evocatively and precisely evoke a certain kind of mood which seeps into your skin and makes you want to read on. And so the genesis of The Loney lay in trying to find the language to express the physical and the psychological, the internal and the external. But descriptions of water and wind don’t necessarily make a novel and so I began to think about how the landscape might be used to explore religion and belief – a subject which had been niggling away at me for some time and perhaps was always going to form my first book. I was brought up as a Roman Catholic and although any belief has long since lapsed its rituals and language and expectations remain vivid. I remember it as a corporal kind of worship in which the body is an important part of the Mass. In the transubstantiation the wafer and wine literally become the flesh and blood of Christ. There are moments set aside for crossing, genuflection, kneeling, and in certain circumstances the thumbing of rosary beads or the kissing of holy relics. The spiritual is the physical, as it is at the top of a high mountain or alone on the moors. Let me start, though, with what I enjoyed about The Loney. Firstly, Andrew Hurley's prose is lucid and visual, evocative of the scenes he is describing to the extent that I felt unusually present in the narrative. His characters are thoroughly well drawn - and that's no easy accomplishment in a multi-character novel like this. He also manages to engender, from the beginning, an air of heart rate raising uneasiness. It's a little like going to a horror movie you know nothing about. You know something's going to happen, you're just not sure what! The poor sod. Apparently he lost it when his wife died. Ended up sectioned in some hospital near Preston, where I always imagined him painting those seascapes over and over again. The boats getting a little smaller and the clouds a little bigger each time, until there was nothing but tempest.”There's a lot that could have gone wrong in this book. Every gothic/horror motif you can think of forms part of the story, including: moors/crumbling old house/dark and dank weather/broken down vehicles/woods/voracious nature/priests/animal mutilation/witches/laughing rooks... etc etc. It is fuelled by myth and susperstition. The Loney is personified, a character itself, full of malevolent will. Death lives there; natural or unnatural, it has become unremarkable. You were raised a Catholic and served as an altar boy. It must have given you an understanding of ritual. Here we talk to Andrew Michael Hurley about his latest achievement, association with the Gothic genre, views on the ‘modern Gothic’ and much more: Hello, Andrew. Congratulations on The Encore Award! How does it feel to have won? It was impossible to truly know the place. It changed with each influx and retreat, and the neap tides would reveal the skeletons of those who thought they could escape its insidious currents. No one ever went near the water. No one apart from us, that is. An unwholesome fecundity pervades the novel. Fr Bernard is the only one who seems immune to the airs of the Loney and to Mummer’s narrow vision. But solid good sense is not enough to avert ghastly events.

A group of religious pilgrims embark to the Loney, an isolated and stormy coastline located a few hours away from London in England, with the intention of visiting a shrine and curing Hanny, a mute teenage boy who suffers from severe learning disabilities. not noticing, or wilfully ignoring, the look of horror that Mummer tried to slide discreetly his way, as though on a folded piece of paper. Without”

Short stories to keep

The baby healed a lot of the peoples ailments. It was yellow because it healed the liver disease of the alcoholic, it had a claw for a hand as it healed collier, it had grey eyes as it healed Clements mother. Born in 1975, growing up near Preston and still living in North West England, a frequent visitor of the coastal edges - Hurley’s prose is prominently touched by place. His work could appear interlaced with a seam of sashaying, mysterious moodiness moving in from the environs which inclines his writing style and subject matter so well to the Gothic genre.