The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley review – a gothic masterpiece

This delicious debut hovers between domestic horror and supernatural unease

The gothic is a seductive but slippery genre, as much emotion as form: you’d be hard pressed to find two academics agreeing wholly on its definition. Often, novels are claimed for the gothic because of a creaking stair or an imperilled maiden; yet true gothic lies not merely in tropes – though these are to be prized – but in an expression of transgression, madness or desire that makes the unnerved reader complicit in the tale. With the publication of Andrew Michael Hurley’s debut The Loney, every gothic bookshelf must make room for a new addition.

The Loney is “a wild and useless length” of the northwest English coastline to which Smith, the narrator, returns repeatedly in memory. The novel opens with the discovery of a child’s body on Coldbarrow in the bay of the Loney; evidently something nasty once happened out there in the mud. The story is disclosed in passages moving between the past and the deeper past; at all times the reader is conscious of the adult Smith as a man unable to slip the surly bonds of childhood. In that childhood, Smith and his brother Hanny are taken by their bitterly devout mother to a religious retreat overlooking the Loney. Together with a priest and sundry devotees, they are to visit a shrine in the hope of curing Hanny, who is mute.

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