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In a remote and seemingly cursed village on the Yorkshire Lancashire border, the inhabitants of Barrowbeck wrestle with life, death and a landscape that is wild and mercurial.
Friends gather to support a widower whose wife has died in mysterious circumstances; an elderly teacher is unnerved by one of his pupils; a childless couple must make an agonising decision; sisters welcome a lodger into their home.
Set over the course of a year, these gothic stories are riven with psychological trauma, unsettling events and encroaching darkness.
Prepare to listen to the voices in the valley.
Friends gather to support a widower whose wife has died in mysterious circumstances; an elderly teacher is unnerved by one of his pupils; a childless couple must make an agonising decision; sisters welcome a lodger into their home.
Set over the course of a year, these gothic stories are riven with psychological trauma, unsettling events and encroaching darkness.
Prepare to listen to the voices in the valley.
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Reviews
PRAISE FOR ANDREW MICHAEL HURLEY:
A tour de force of physiological fantasia . . . Writing of this quality - sensuous, exact, observant - ensures that other scenes, too, pulse with vitality . . . Hurley's gothic storylines send spectres of deathliness through his fictional world. His prose brings it vividly alive
I will confidently predict that no reader will guess where it's heading . . . Hurley's ability to create a world that's like ours in many ways and really not in many others is again on full display . . . Starve Acre, leaner and perhaps even more unsettling than its predecessors, may well be his best novel so far
Beautifully written and triumphantly creepy
A perfectly pitched tale of suspense and the dark side of folklore . . . perfect, page-turning reading for a dark night
This kind of book, as with ghost stories from M.R. James to Susan Hill, demands a phenomenal control of language and atmosphere to work at all, and Hurley provides it in spades . . . This is a wonderful story of its type that has all the qualities of unease, nastiness, terror, psychological trauma and implied physical revulsion one expects from folk horror. But it's nothing to the denouement it foreshadows