Congratulations to #TheLoney for being almost the Costa Winner this week - loved this book - most of the way through. #Hurley creates a world full of threat and foreboding; we are kept delightfully - and in most sinister fashion - on the edge of our readerly seats.
How does he do it? The page eggers are the sense of menace personified; look at the language as they arrive: 'crawled'; 'nightmare'; 'grotesque'; 'savage'. They are so effective because the the threat they bring with them is never quite realised - and this is important in Gothic writing where the thrill lies in terror, not horror. More of that in a moment!
This novel has echoes of Fay Weldon's Puffball. But Weldon (arguably true ruler of domestic Gothic) achieved something that Hurley has not: she stepped back from an overwritten ending to leave us with a sense of delicious wonder that the ordinary can appear so menacing/sinister. The Loney descends into farcical horror: the sacrificial baby? With 'shrivelled yellow face' and 'mangled claw'? Really? Horror, not terror.
And the miraculous recovery of Hanny? Oh please.
Its reductive, and a shame. So nearly great!
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