Book review: “Starve Acre” by Andrew Michael Hurley

Richard and Juliette Willoughby live in a remote farm house in the Yorkshire Dales, coping with the sudden death of their young son Ewan. Richard, a university professor on a forced sabbatical, spends his grieving hours digging around the house in search of the remains of a legendary gallows tree that used to grow on the plot in centuries past. Juliette potters about the house and spends inordinate amounts of time in Ewan’s room, believing the boy to be there, still living among them.

As the story unfolds, we get to learn about various unsettling events that had transformed their otherwise charming, happy boy into a secretive and unpredictably cruel child, prone to violent outbursts. It all seemingly had to do with a mysterious figure by the name of Jack Gray – someone only the boy could hear, telling him to do things he would normally never do. Did the boy develop a mental illness, or was he in fact influenced by a malevolent entity of some sort?

After the boy’s death, the parents’ grief is compounded by yet more inexplicable and strange events. A long dead animal – a hare – miraculously comes to life and refuses to leave Juliette’s side. There is something evil about the hare (he viciously kills their pet dog), yet Juliette embraces it and tends to it with motherly care. Treating it as a human baby, it becomes a grotesque replacement for a child. A sense of madness rapidly envelopes the house, further isolating an already ostracised family.

These few sketches are just the basics of Andrew Michael Hurley’s thrilling novel “Starve Acre,” first published in 2019. It’s eerie and suspenseful, but in a very elegant, subdued way. Its rural setting and folkloric elements place it firmly in the tradition of English folk horror genre, where there is a special – troubled – connection between the protagonists, the land and its numinous, uncanny presences.

There is now a film adaptation of Starve Acre released in 2023, directed by Daniel Kokotajlo and starring Matt Smith and Morfydd Clark. Haven’t seen it yet, I can only hope it did justice to this wonderfully creepy novel.

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Starve Acre by Andrew Michael Hurley was originally published by John Murray in 2019.

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ADDITIONAL READING

Andrew Michael Hurley interview: ‘Folk horror debunks the idea that England is a green and pleasant land’

Starve Acre by Andrew Michael Hurley review – digging up grief in another superb folk horror

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COVER IMAGE CREDIT

Photo by Fabien TWB via Unsplash.