He has been praised by Stephen King and heaped with awards, but as the author of northern gothic ‘masterpiece’ The Loney reveals, in the first of a new series of interviews with debut writers, it isn’t success that scares him
Andrew Michael Hurley likes to know which part of The Loney unsettles you the most. It’s different for everyone: is it the setting – a decrepit house on a “wild and useless length of English coastline”? Or the occasional touch of gothic – a girl’s face glimpsed in a window, an effigy of Jesus found hanging in a wet wood, a crown of thorns topping a sheep skull? Or simply the relentless tension – who will go the furthest to cure a mute boy: his fanatical mother or the presence she believes is God, but the reader knows, deep down, is something else entirely?
In person, Hurley is a little rumpled, but cheerful. He has just won the best debut and book of the year prizes at the British Book Industry awards (BBIA) and is living what sounds like a debut author’s dream: after 300 copies of The Loney were published quietly by small Yorkshire press Tartarus in November 2014, two months later a few doozy reviews brought it to the attention of one of the UK’s most venerable publishers, John Murray. It was picked as a book of the year by the Sunday Times, Daily Mail, Daily Express, Daily Telegraph and Times. Horror grandmaster Stephen King called it “an amazing piece of fiction”. In January 2016, Hurley won the Costa first novel award.
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