This eerie, shortish book apparently had an earlier outing this year, when it purported to be a reissue of a 1972 ‘folk horror’ novel by Jonathan Buckley. Now John Murray reveal it as the third novel by Andrew Michael Hurley, whose gothic debut, The Loney, received widespread plaudits.
Folk horror, a term popularised by the actor and writer Mark Gatiss, is one of those definitions, like ‘new weird’ or indeed, science fiction, useful to and immediately understood by those already familiar with the territory, but harder to nail down. It’s largely British, rooted in landscape, in isolated rural communities, in the subversion of religious practice and the suspicion that older, pagan forces are at work, sowing discord, suspicion, mayhem and death. Robin Hardy’s film The Wicker Man (1973) is usually considered the ne plus ultra of the genre.
Starve Acre might well have been written in the early 1970s.
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