“It was very strange. And it still feels odd. I still have to pinch myself about it.” Andrew Michael Hurley is talking, via Zoom from his home in Preston, Lancashire, about the extraordinary success of his debut novel, The Loney, a decade ago. The book, a work of gothic “folk horror”, experienced a sort of vertical take-off: initially published in a print run of 350 by a small press, it was picked up by a mainstream publisher, and subsequently won several awards – and sold in bucketloads.
Since then, Hurley has published two more novels in a similarly sinister vein – Devil’s Day (2017) and Starve Acre (2019) – and now, after a five-year gap, comes his new novel, Barrowbeck.
Well, sort of new. Barrowbeck is made up of stories all set in the eponymous fictional village in Hurley’s literary stamping ground in the north of England. It’s a wide-ranging book: the last story is set in the near future of 2041, and the first story is in an unspecified historical period, but Hurley tells me today that “sort of pre-Roman, first-century AD, is what I was thinking”. (An exclusive there for The Irish Times.)
But the book has its origins in a BBC radio series Hurley wrote that was broadcast in 2022: Voices from the Village contained most of the stories that went into Barrowbeck the novel. When Hurley sat down to make it into a novel (“my editor was very keen to do a print version of those stories”), he found it harder than expected to transfer from radio to page.
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“Quite a lot of them felt a bit empty, really. I’d written them specifically for radio, for voices and performance. So it was a question of digging into the characters and stories a bit more, so a slightly longer process than I thought it was going to be, but very enjoyable. And a different way of putting a book together.”
It also strikes me that on radio, you need to be clearer for the listener, who doesn’t have the luxury of pausing to think about a detail in the story, let alone flicking back a couple of pages to check what just happened. “Yeah, with a novel you’ve got that space to think and elasticity of form to play around with. With a novel you can just do a lot more.”
‘England’s green and pleasant land.’ Folk horror gets under the skin of that and shows how weird and messed-up the history of these places is
Some of the stories in Barrowbeck are very grounded in everyday reality – albeit with themes recognisable to Hurley readers, of social coercion, of parochialism – and some more fantastical, such as one about a fair with miniature animals that visits the village (“Polar bears the size of mice. Elephants small enough to be held in the hand”), or one with a woman who grows children in a garden. Where did they come from?
“The stories were written coming out of the end of the pandemic, and there’s a lot about claustrophobia and entrapment, but also the idea that there are forces at work we have no control over. I think during the pandemic, everyone experienced that. There are always things preventing us from doing what we want to do, and we sort of muddle through. But there are moments when that vulnerability is very apparent and we’re reminded of it.”
Those “forces at work” in Hurley’s fiction are often at that uneasy juncture between natural and supernatural. Does he see these things as separate, or two sides of the same coin?
“My feeling is that they’re part of the same thing, or that our perception of the natural world is that we feel separate from it, and so it’s quite mysterious to us. We have this ego that constantly wants to explain and understand things, but it’s also the mechanism that keeps us feeling slightly exiled from what’s out there.
“It has come up quite a few times in the other books: the question of whether there is some energy, some monster, some ghost, in reality, or is it just human beings projecting their own fears and frustrations on a particular place and feeling them echo back at them.” And? “I don’t come to any conclusions about that.”
Okay then. But this seems connected to the essential quality in Barrowbeck: the sense of not knowing what is real, or why strange things have happened. Is it important to leave gaps for the reader?
“Definitely, yeah. The stories I enjoy most are the ones I don’t understand. An enduring influence on me is Robert Aickman. And Shirley Jackson. Both are writers where, after reading their stories, you know something’s happened, you’ve been disturbed in some way, but you can’t quite say what it is. It builds into this world that is a blend of very ordinary, familiar things, but also the weird and odd and fantastical. That’s what I try to do in my own work, so that it’s a space that accommodates reality and unreality at the same moment.
“Robert Aickman,” he continues, “has a quote: ‘explanations only render down truth for the relief of the timid.’ I’ve always been resistant to try to explain [my work], because it defeats the purpose slightly.”
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Aside from resisting explanations, a consistency in Hurley’s work is the importance of particular places. All his books started out inspired by the land where they are set, and the landscape of the north of England has a strong hold for him personally. He tells me about how, during lockdown, when British citizens could only go outdoors within their local area, “I could see the Lake District hills to the north, and they just seemed ineffably remote. I desperately wanted to go there, but I couldn’t.”
But there’s a strain, isn’t there, of love for the land and Englishness in particular, that can tip over into something uglier – the strains of nationalism? “There is. And that’s something that I think folk horror is good at undermining. It’s very good at getting under the skin of that chocolate-box England – the ‘right’ people being in charge and nothing changing. ‘England’s green and pleasant land.’ And folk horror gets under the skin of that and shows how weird and messed-up the history of these places is – that these beautiful virgin valleys are places of massacre and hangings and atrocities.”
Darkness, though, needn’t preclude humour, and there’s a vein of black comedy running through Barrowbeck, such as one story where a man has his body buried at the end of the garden to make it harder for his estranged wife to sell the house. (Well, I thought it was funny anyway.) “I found that story funny as well,” says Hurley. (Phew.) “There’s a great tradition of having that blend of [the] dark, macabre, but also funny as well. The League of Gentleman is a great example of that, or The Wicker Man – there are scenes that are really unsettling, but it’s also really quite camp and funny as well.”
The Loney did so well, unexpectedly, and then I had a contract to write the next book. I became really hyper-conscious that people actually want to read the words I’m typing
Hurley tells me that he grew up reading horror and gothic fiction, from Stephen King and James Herbert to Clive Barker, as well as classic examples such as Poe. What, I wonder, attracts him to weird fiction? “There’s a certain amount of nostalgia I suppose associated with it, but it’s always fascinated me, the possibility of that kind of otherness. It may be to do with a Catholic upbringing, where you’re asked to believe in all kinds of supernatural things. I’m a very lapsed Catholic, as you might have guessed, but I think horror and supernatural stories fill that gap because they offer lots of the same kind of things that are missing in the ordinary world.”
Barrowbeck is Hurley’s fourth book, so I wonder if he finds novel writing to be something that gets easier the more you do it? “No, it’s harder!” he says immediately. “My second book was much harder to write than my first, mainly because of the weight of expectation.”
Your expectations, or other people’s? “Mostly for myself, because The Loney did so well, unexpectedly, and then I had a contract to write the next book. I became really hyper-conscious, sitting in my little room, that people actually want to read the words that I’m typing, which I didn’t have with my first book. It took me quite a while to get over that and get the book done.
“That pressure has slightly dissipated over time, but I think all writers are probably the same. You’re constantly challenging yourself to try new things. You try new material, you set novels in different places, you write for radio, for example. Those challenges mean every project comes with a new set of things to learn – which is frustrating, but I think ultimately makes us better.”
For Hurley, writing a book is not a planned process, but one of discovery. “I’m not a planner at all. I think there’s something interesting in the working out as you go along, and finding the story through the writing and the act of discovery. If I plan too much, I’d want to deviate from that plan within five minutes anyway. I think John Updike said something like, ‘Writing and rewriting is the constant search for what one is saying’. It’s through writing,” he concludes, “that you discover what the novel is about.” Long may Hurley’s search – his process of discovery – continue.
Barrowbeck is published on October 24th by John Murray
