by Andrew Michael Hurley
Hardcover, 368 pages
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, May 10, 2016
5 stars
The Loney is a desolate stretch of English coastline that is home to the village of Coldbarrow and a house called The Moorings. This is the place that serves to house the pilgrims that come to worship at the local Gothic church and it's shrine. Led by the new parish priest, Father Bernard, our narrator, his mute brother, his parents and a handful of other church faithful arrive, expecting to witness miracles. Instead, they'll wrestle with faith and doubt and what some will witness will haunt them for a lifetime.
********************
"I often thought there was too much time there. 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."
Not quite horror but more than just a mystery or historical fiction, The Loney is certainly a Gothic something. Filled with descriptions of grey skies and bleak seascapes, the Loney is more than a setting as it becomes almost a character itself. There are suspicions of a priest gone mad, rumors of a suicide, and hints and whispers of witchcraft. The story feels set in a much older time, with only a few cultural references placing it in the 1970s.
The narrative framing is brilliantly done - after the skeleton of an infant washes ashore, the protagonist, "Tonto" Smith, is sharing the memory of this childhood pilgrimage with his therapist thirty years later. Viewing the events through both the lens of childhood memories and the distance of time paints Smith as potentially unreliable. Smith is unsettled and unsure of himself and he passes that emotional unrest onto the reader. Interestingly, the most disturbing elements of the story aren't supernatural, but rather just brief peeks into disquieting aspects of Coldbarrow. Age-old village traditions, a young girl in an unsettling circumstance, and the brutality of nature are just a few things that help to construct an uncomfortable atmosphere.
Religion has weight in this story. The friendships between the pilgrims exist only because of their connection to one another through their faith, which is an old faith, heavy on ritual and resistant to change. The conflict between the Catholicism of the pilgrims and the paganism of the villagers mimics the conflict between the parishioners themselves. Faith is plays an integral role in the way this book is wrapped up - faith is awakened in a character and miracles are performed, but perhaps not in the way the characters would have expected.
I have difficulty believing that this book was a debut. The writing and plot are as near to perfect as I could expect from a novel like this, the pacing is spot on, and the creepiness factor sneaks up on you before you realize what's happening. I look forward to seeing what Hurley writes next.
Backlist Bump: For another Gothic period piece in which the fright comes from sources that are not necessarily supernatural, read The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters.
What to Drink: Despite the pilgrims not drinking themselves, Father Bernard made sure he had some scotch on hand to fortify himself against the cold and the week at The Moorings. I'd follow his example and pour yourself a stiff one.
(Thank you to NetGalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.)
