BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES, FT, METRO AND MAIL ON SUNDAY
‘The new master of menace’ Sunday Times
In the wink of an eye, as quick as a flea,
The Devil he jumped from me to thee.
And only when the Devil had gone,
Did I know that he and I’d been one . . .
Every autumn, John Pentecost returns to the farm where he grew up to help gather the sheep down from the moors for the winter. Very little changes in the Endlands, but this year, his grandfather – the Gaffer – has died and John’s new wife, Katherine, is accompanying him for the first time.
Each year, the Gaffer would redraw the boundary lines of the village, with pen and paper, but also through the remembrance of tales and timeless communal rituals, which keep the sheep safe from the Devil. But as the farmers of the Endlands bury the Gaffer, and prepare to gather the sheep, they begin to wonder whether they’ve let the Devil in after all . . .
‘The new master of menace’ Sunday Times
In the wink of an eye, as quick as a flea,
The Devil he jumped from me to thee.
And only when the Devil had gone,
Did I know that he and I’d been one . . .
Every autumn, John Pentecost returns to the farm where he grew up to help gather the sheep down from the moors for the winter. Very little changes in the Endlands, but this year, his grandfather – the Gaffer – has died and John’s new wife, Katherine, is accompanying him for the first time.
Each year, the Gaffer would redraw the boundary lines of the village, with pen and paper, but also through the remembrance of tales and timeless communal rituals, which keep the sheep safe from the Devil. But as the farmers of the Endlands bury the Gaffer, and prepare to gather the sheep, they begin to wonder whether they’ve let the Devil in after all . . .
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Reviews
This impeccably written novel tightens like a clammy hand around your throat
The nebulous presence of the Devil is evoked so palpably in this novel that at times I hardly dared look up when reading for fear of seeing him grinning at me from the chair next to mine
The new master of menace. This chilling follow-up to The Loney confirms its author as a writer to watch
Chilling and captivating; read at your peril
Beautifully captures a bleak landscape and the feeling of something evil and unknowable in the moors, the hills and the byways
Hurley is a fine writer, with concerns that place him a little to the left of the literary mainstream, a remove that makes him extremely interesting
Hurley is a superb storyteller. He leads you up on to the moors, into the eye of a snowstorm, dropping little clues, sinister hints at devilment and demonic possession. Then he changes course, scuffs over the prints in the snow, springs new villainies on you, abandons you overnight in the hills
This is a story with pull. Its lively, building sense of evil is thoroughly entangled with the assumptions of the way of life depicted, that apparently timeless relationship of the smallholder and the moor
Makes for impressively uncomfortable reading
A gorgeously written novel that leaves the reader wondering and perturbed
Devil's Day is evocative and unsettling, exploring the potency of tradition, place and allegiance in a brutal rural environment
The follow up to The Loney deploys myth, landscape and the tropes of horror to chilling effect
Andrew Michael Hurley's The Loney was one of the surprise stand-outs of last year, and a worthy winner of the Costa First Novel Award. His new novel, Devil's Day is equally good . . . it is a work of goose-flesh eeriness . . . Hurley's work is like a reincarnation of novels such as John Buchan's Witch Wood or the stories of M.R. James. His prose is precise and his eye gimlet
A master of flesh-creeping menace. Around macabre happenings in a remote farming community on the bleak moors of the Lancashire-Yorkshire border, he weaves a terror tale of human vulnerability. Hidden horrors surface. Eerie malevolence flickers. Nature's routine cruelties are caught with a fierce accuracy that Ted Hughes would have admired
Andrew Michael Hurley is adept at making his readers' spines tingle
Hurley's first novel was The Loney, a prize-winning gothic triumph produced by a Yorkshire press, later picked up by John Murray. Devil's Day shares the same dark sense of foreboding . . . laced with menace
Expect pastoral lyricism - snowstorms sweeping in across an ancient landscape - spliced with gothic shivers
The devil is everywhere in this deliciously creepy second novel from the author of The Loney . . . Andrew Michael Hurley combines the eerie power of folk memory with a much more modern manifestation of horror and the final pages are among the most unsettling you'll read this year