“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,” Jake Kerridge wrote in the Literary Review.
In Starve Acre, his third novel, published in 2019, Juliette and Richard live in a moorland farmhouse and are grieving over the death of their young son. Juliette seeks comfort with a group of occultists because what harm ever came from that? A film version, starring Morfydd Clark and Matt Smith, was released in cinemas in July in the US and September in the UK. Its director, Daniel Kokotajlo, used a variety of techniques to make the film look as though it had actually been made in the 1970s like the Kneale plays that both he and Hurley admire. “We spent a long time working on how to capture that feeling,” he tells the . “We watched a lot of old horror films and weird British TV. Part of it was down to the lighting and I also found some amazing old 1970s lenses that created a little bit of distortion on the image that looked fantastic.” He sees Hurley as the contemporary heir to authors such as famed Victorian ghost story writer MR James.
Why scary stories are booming
“The legendary director Wes Craven said, ‘Scary movies don’t create fear, they release fear,’ and I think that goes a long way to explain the rise in popularity of the horror genre in the world of books, and why some of those books, such as Starve Acre, have been adapted into excellent films,” says Yassine Belkacemi, editorial director at John Murray Press. “Horror is an effective prism for writers to explore our world, our ears, our subconscious, when the reality of everyday politics, news, and society can be overwhelming. Especially in the US, which is going through an extremely polarising time when it comes to many issues, the world of horror, ironically, seems to have been a genre to explore the country’s greatest fears whether that be the work of Shirley Jackson, Stephen King or Jordan Peele.”
Starve Acre completed what Hurley thought of as a loose trilogy about landscape and responses to it. The new Book, Barrowbeck, further cements his reputation as Britain’s creepiest author, but also marks something of a departure. It is a collection of 13 linked, chronologically-arranged short stories – some of which began life as stories on Radio 4 – about life in a valley in the north of England. “There are some stories that are folk horror, there are others that lean more into fantasy and science fiction,” Hurley says. The collection begins with the tale of the establishment of a settlement in the valley in the distant past and ends with a piece set in the near future when the valley has been ravaged by climate change.
“I enjoyed writing that story although it is quite depressing to think about what our future might look like,” says Hurley. “I’ve been reading a lot of apocalyptic, environmental disaster fiction – John Christopher’s The Death of Grass, for example. An incredible book. It’s a genre of writing I would like to revisit.”
His next novel, expected to be published late next year, also breaks new ground for Hurley, with an urban rather than a rural setting. The central character is in a decaying seaside town out of season, recalling a summer holiday there years ago. However, it would seem a fairly safe bet that this particular seaside holiday won’t be all ice cream, sandcastles, and innocent fun in the sun.
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