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This review was originally posted on my No Time is Passing blog: notimeispassing.wordpress.com/2014/10/25/andrew-michael-hurley-the-loney/

The Loney is Andrew Michael Hurley’s first novel, after two collections of short stories (The Unusual Death of Julie Christie and Cages And Other Stories). As usual for Tartarus Press, the book is sumptuously presented, the oblique miniature on the dustjacket giving nothing away about the novel’s contents but nonetheless setting the tone at just the right pitch right from the outset: a haunting, blurred landscape sliced through by a menacing swathe of trees; in the background stands the shadow of an old house; this glimpse no more than a far-off echo perhaps of the titular stretch of brooding coastline which although unspoken is one of the novel’s main protagonists.

On the surface, the book is the story of the narrator Smith (does he have a first name? Smith seems such an everyman surname…) and his mentally disabled brother Andrew, or Hanny as Smith calls him. They gather with family and acquaintances for a pilgrimage to a noted Catholic shrine in a remote coastal area of Lancashire. It is the story of a transformation, of transfiguration and of the place faith has in their lives and the lives of the others around the boys. There is resolution of a sort, but the genesis of the miracle is terrifyingly uncertain and what will come later, after we read the final pages of the book, is frighteningly unclear.

The book also seems to me to be about loneliness and isolation. The Loney: shades of alone and lonely, even though the word might at first seem a playful, harmless, even childish name for a stretch of countryside. It’s obvious as the book progresses that the Loney is unwelcoming and unforgiving. Hurley handles the effect of the landscape well and his narrative is allowed to unfurl at a pace which is perfectly suited to the story’s various minor and major revelations and which never feels hurried. The Loney as a place is ominously present throughout, even if not everything in the story occurs there. There is a highly convincing, pervasive atmosphere of uncomfortable dampness and otherness; a half-remembered feeling of the 1970s before the advent of a technology that allows nowhere to be forgotten or abandoned any longer.

Aside from the painterly skill with which he depicts the growing sense of unease and unreality in that forgotten landscape, it’s also noteworthy how the author reproduces the dialogue in the novel. The interaction of the dysfunctional main characters, all tied together by their devout Roman Catholicism and a strict over-reliance on its rituals and structure in the wake of the death of their former parish priest, is masterful. These people have little else in common but their faith, or what they perceive as faith; but without it, everything else is lost and relationships crumble. The scenes where the characters converse, particularly the narrator and Father Bernard, are remarkably credible and fluid. I was there with them, eavesdropping, uncomfortable and uncertain; and also afraid.

What is also critical in the protagonists’ lives and in the story proper is the part played by faith, even if it’s obvious by the end that such faith takes many forms, not all of them a matter of personal choice. I suspect that Hurley was brought up with Roman Catholicism: the detail of this in the novel is so authentic and convincing that I’d be surprised it he hadn’t been. Having had the same upbringing, I found the novel all the more realistic for the verisimilitude of religious detail – and, by its end, that authenticity makes things quite horrific.

Father Bernard calls Smith by a nickname: Tonto, no doubt after the Native American partner of the Lone Ranger (there’s that word lone again). That same Tonto who fondly calls the Lone Ranger kemosabe (“faithful friend”). But Smith’s faith is uncertain, never clarified and by the end, even he is not sure what he believes, or if faith has transmogrified into fear.

When I think back on reading The Loney, I realise that, consciously or unconsciously, it is a book of dualities. Two very different houses, Moorings and Thessaly, separated by a dangerous stretch of coastline only passable at certain tides, and unpredictably so it seems. Separated, too, by their outlooks: on the surface, both faded, unwelcoming and alien, but the surprise comes with the revelation of which house breeds the strongest faith and which is filled with sickness.

Then there are the two boys, Smith and Hanny, opposites in some ways but who have a communication only they truly understand. There are the two priests, Father Wilfred, recently passed away, and Father Bernard, different aspects of Catholicism, the old and the new. And finally there is the competition of creeds which becomes the central brooding duality of the book.

Comparisons have been drawn between Hurley’s novel and The Wicker Man. I can see why that is, but I think it’s also slightly misleading. To me, the horror of The Wicker Man has always been that sense of finality and utter hopelessness in its denouement. It’s shockingly, brutally clear what befalls Howie in the climax to the film: we watch, horrified, in no doubt as to his fate, at least on Earth if not in the hereafter. With The Loney, things are a little different and left more vague; it’s a gnawing, questioning vagueness that one gets in the most oblique supernatural fiction. I’m still not certain, after quite a bit of reflection, what exactly happens in the concluding sections of this book and in my view that is a major triumph of the story. It’s the hidden spaces and the places in between that haunt this story, and raise doubts about what did happen to Hanny–and to the narrator–and what is to come after the last words of the novel end and only the blank page is left.

What I loved about The Loney is that it struck me as the kind of book Robert Aickman might have written if his strange stories had expanded into strange novels. Yes, it’s more narratively linear and “filled out” than Aickman’s work, and probably Hurley’s portrayal of the novel’s human characters as distinct from the landscape is less contemptuous and alien than some of Aickman’s but there is a real question at the end of this book as to what the horror actually was, or is, and what we are meant to take from it. And that strikes me as remarkably Aickmanesque in tone, and therefore as a very good thing indeed.

The Loney is highly recommended for those who like articulate, striking work that challenges after the fact and lingers in the memory. It’s one of the most convincing pieces of modern supernatural fiction I’ve read in a long time.

This review was originally posted on my No Time is Passing blog: notimeispassing.wordpress.com/2014/11/26/timothy-j-jarvis-the-wanderer/

The Wanderer is the debut novel by Timothy Jarvis. I read it a couple of months ago and the book’s blend of Shielian ‘last man’ fantasy and time-twisted, oneiric horror has stayed with me ever since the last page. This review is a much-expanded version of a short post I felt I had to put on Facebook shortly after reaching the end of this brilliant, brilliant book.

Jarvis himself has described The Wanderer‘s charms as ‘Highlander meets Arthur Machen’s The Three Impostors, meets M.P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud. With booze.’ Even if somewhat tongue-in-cheek, with a write-up like that, how could one resist? And there is booze. That part of his mini-write-up isn’t tongue-in-cheek at all.

Let me start by saying that I can’t recommend this book enough to anyone with even a passing interest in weird fiction and fantastical literature of the last 120 years or so. The Wanderer is simply superb: a highly original, deeply unsettling and utterly gripping novel, the imagery of which will, I’m sure, clutch at your innards for some time to come. It’s in part a portmanteau piece, with different character-led narratives that are interconnected in quite a fiendish way – and there is indeed a fiend at the heart of this novel, as grim and cruel and relentless as the psychopathic Mr. Punch himself. Jarvis describes himself as a writer of antic fiction, which is borne out here in large measure. But the nature of this beast is not just antic, but corybantic also – it’s supremely literate, but also frenzied and shocking and rending in equal proportion.

The novel’s dark premise is difficult to summarise without giving away important plot details, so I won’t do that here as it would spoil the flow of this unique book. The Wanderer is a complex, layered narrative with a central theme that becomes apparent only when the reader is quite far into the story, too far in to climb back out, perhaps: I will only say that once the novel’s revelations are laid bare, the earlier sections of the narrative take on an altogether more chilling aspect and the tension reaches a level of cloying tautness as the story hurtles towards its conclusion. Herein you’ll encounter a missing author of strange stories and his final manuscript, with the same title as this book, be it fiction or otherwise; immortality as the cruelest jest of all; a horrifying game of hunter and hunted across the millennia; a dying planet; an awkward camaraderie of characters that is shattered in chilling ways; and much more, all of which slots together ultimately like a complex puzzle. As Jarvis has noted, the novel has a flavour reminiscent of Shiel’s The Purple Cloud, a book I love for its grandiloquent strangeness and singularity, although I know it doesn’t find favour with everyone, but this novel goes beyond anything Shiel attempted.

The horror of The Wanderer is visceral in places, too – and I use that word both figuratively and literally so fevered is the author’s imagination – yet that only helps to cement the strangeness of the narrative as it jumps to the far-distant future and back with casual disdain for standard frames of temporal reference.

This is an intelligent, ludic work, beautifully articulate and poetic, with respectful yet impish reverence given to the best writers of strange stories over the last few decades. It’s also surprisingly and delightfully grim in all the right ways. I wouldn’t say it’s Aickmanesque per se but I got from it some of the grotesque otherness of Aickman’s finest, most genre-defying pieces.

The Wanderer has been my novel of the year so far, and there’s only a few weeks left of this one so I can’t see it being bettered; in fact, I haven’t read as cohesive and compelling a weird fiction novel in a very long time. The fact that it is a debut makes it all the more revelatory and I cannot recommend this book enough. Even with the teetering pile(s) of titles on my to read list, I sense that I’ll be revisiting this one very soon to see what I may have missed along the way the first time.