Miracles. Bodies. Death. Superstition. Hidden Rooms. The Loney. Then there is the..something, the something. Oh my word. I'm truly lost for words where the ending took me. It took much reflection on the entire book, beautifully written. Hannay is more attuned to the import of the place than his brother. He is fascinated with the pregnant girl and her unborn child, and perhaps senses the implications of her presence for the child and for himself.

Mummers is less than happy with the new younger priest who is more accommodating in his faith. The previous zealous, ritual obsessed priest, Father Wilfred, is now mysteriously dead leaving behind questions. As the boys play, they come across a pregnant teenage girl who intrigues them. The locals are less than welcoming and Smith finds himself eavesdropping on conversations. An unsettling atmosphere of menace pervades throughout. I was particularly enamoured of the relationship between the two brothers. There's a lot that could have gone wrong in this book. Every gothic/horror motif you can think of forms part of the story, including: moors/crumbling old house/dark and dank weather/broken down vehicles/woods/voracious nature/priests/animal mutilation/witches/laughing rooks... etc etc. It is fuelled by myth and susperstition. The Loney is personified, a character itself, full of malevolent will. Death lives there; natural or unnatural, it has become unremarkable.Their family belongs to a devotedly faithful Catholic parish which was once overseen by an extremely strict and pious man named Father Wilfred. The narrator recalls how sadistic he could be disciplining the boys, yet he's also eventually portrayed as a complex and sympathetically troubled man. Before their pilgrimage during that particular Easter Father Wilfred dies and he's replaced by a much younger and more liberal man Father Bernard McGill from Belfast. Where Father Wilfred advocated for absolute truth and confession, Father Bernard understands that “the truth isn’t always set in stone. In fact it never is. There are just versions of it. And sometimes it’s prudent to be selective about the version you choose to give to people.” Mummer and Father Bernard gradually clash in a fascinating way as she wishes him to use a more strictly enforced regiment for practicing faith. Out of this tension and the strange things happening amongst the local population, Hurley creates an intriguing sense of conflict where the meaning of faith is questioned and tested.

This is a novel of the unsaid, the implied, the barely grasped or understood, crammed with dark holes and blurry spaces that your imagination feels compelled to fill’ Observer A sudden mist, a mumble of thunder over the sea, the wind scurrying along the beach...was sometimes all it took to make you feel as though something was about to happen. Though quite what, I didn’t know.”

MyHome.ie (Opens in new window) • Top 1000 • The Gloss (Opens in new window) • Recruit Ireland (Opens in new window) • Irish Times Training (Opens in new window) Gradually, as the story unfolds, we learn that Smith spent many Easters visiting the Loney – an isolated place on the coast, where there is a holy shrine. Smith’s brother Andrew, called Hanny, is mute, and possibly disabled, and the boy’s parents – ‘mummer’ and ‘farther’ visit the shrine with Mr and Mrs Belderboss and Father Wilfred, their parish priest and the brother of Mr Belderboss. Mummer is desperate for a miracle, to restore Hanny to normality, but then and they stop visiting for some years and Father Wilfred seems to suffer a crisis of faith. Andrew Michael Hurley’s debut novel The Loney, first published in 2014 does just that. He didn’t necessarily set out with the intention for the novel to be ‘Gothic’ however – basing the subject of the book on ‘The Loney’ itself which is a length of mysterious, muddy coastline on England’s North West edge, not too far from where Morecambe is now. Gothic textures accrue. There is an albino cat , a pig’s heart studded with nails, a sheep’s skull, “the white worm of the optic nerve still attached” You were raised a Catholic and served as an altar boy. It must have given you an understanding of ritual.

death has the timing of the world’s worst comedian and I think he was right. When people die, it’s natural to regret how we treated them when they were alive. Heaven knows, there are dozens of things I wished I’d asked my mammy and daddy when they were around; times I’d like to wipe clean away. Things I wish I had or hadn’t said. It’s the worst kind of guilt, because it’s completely irreparable.” After Hanny is healed the family leaves and its all over. If Hanny and his brother had not stumbled upon the group of satanists at the end of the novel the family would have left and nothing would have changed. All of the build up for danger was for nothing? An unwholesome fecundity pervades the novel. Fr Bernard is the only one who seems immune to the airs of the Loney and to Mummer’s narrow vision. But solid good sense is not enough to avert ghastly events.

The problem is that in the Endlands one story begs the telling of another and another,” admits John Pentecost to his 10-year-old son Adam, “and in all of them the devil plays his part.” The obliquity of this statement, perhaps our earliest indication of John’s self-deception, will be revealed as things develop. He is telling Adam the devil’s own story, while Andrew Michael Hurley is telling John Pentecost’s. They are inextricably entwined.

Despite its harshness, it’s certainly somewhere that could make you feel released from the modern world… The answers to these questions are often unsettling, and occasionally horrific. But as we see Father Bernard’s faith in action and how it differs from Mummer’s and Father Wilfred’s, as we begin discover the powerful and primitive beliefs of the people of the Lancashire countryside, we are drawn—as Tonto and Hanny are drawn—into questioning the nature of belief itself and our own relationship to faith. Once the tables had been wiped clean, Mummer draped the dishcloth over the tap in the kitchen, Farther switched off the lights and we went out into the slush. It seemed an absurd ending to a life.” I still have some lingering doubts/questions/problems, however. When Father Wilfred finds the homeless guy's body, I didn't really buy that scene as motivation for him losing his faith. I expected the cause to be something much more extreme. And the situation of Father Wilfred with his "secretary" Miss Bunce--just when it seemed there was going to be a big revelation there as to their relationship it's immediately dispelled. Not sure if I missed something. And when Tonto tries to pass off the diary to Father Bernard, he emphasizes its importance at being able to help Father Bernard understand how Father Wilfred lost his faith and/or to explain whether or not he'd committed suicide. So that build-up had really led me to think there would be something earth-shattering (or at least reputation-shattering) revealed in the diary, but it was nothing more than him finding the dead vagrant from the beginning of the story washed up on the beach. Meh. How does that make one lose one's faith? He'd even told himself that the tramp "was from the Other world and got what he deserved." That rationalization perfectly fits with his portrayed personality. I was expecting his faith to have been lost due to either: 1) something involving him and Miss Bunce together, or 2) something involving him discovering the "witchcraft" at work on the Loney. While they were going out, a man who was demon-possessed and could not talk was brought to Jesus. And when the demon was driven out, the man who had been mute spoke. The crowd was amazed and said, “Nothing like this has ever been seen in Israel.”

A very devout Catholic family travel with their priest, and some fellow members of their church, to the Loney – a wild stretch of the Lancashire coast. They’re hoping to pray for the health of one of the sons - a mute, slightly retarded boy called Hanney. The narrator of the story is Hanney’s brother, Smith. They stay at a run down, creepy old house called The Moorings. But we have some big defects as well. It is a tedious read & there are more loose ends than Penelope’s loom after she’d undone her day’s efforts. Just how did an American WWII army rifle find its way to an old house on the English coast, complete with ammunition? How did Hanny manage to load it without instruction & without ending up with a very sore thumb? Not to mention tossing it about as if it were a baton - an M1 weighs 9.5 lbs & is rather awkwardly balanced. An Enfield would have been a better choice, lighter, better balanced, easier to load & much more likely to be found in England. We are never told why the narrator’s parents are called Mummer & Farther & I kept wondering whether these were pet names or dialect pronunciations. In a non-rhotic London dialect I expect the former would sound to a North American ear like “mummah” but how would the latter sound different from usual? Also how could there have been a 300 year old shrine to St. Anne in England after the Reformation? There’s also a Catholic church with a frightening Day of Doom picture on the wall that’s supposed to have survived from the Middle Ages. Not likely. I thought that the baby seemed to have acquired the ailments that had been cured - not sure what it got from Hanny though? It's only relatively recently in our history as a species that the relationship we've traditionally had with 'the land' has been severed on a mass scale. Before the Industrial Revolution, the vast majority of people lived either in or close to what we might call the 'countryside' and for thousands of years we've lived off the land, reared animals there, worshipped it, shaped it. In the timeline of human beings, the period we've spent living compressed into concrete and steel and glass in cities is very brief and arguably 'unnatural' actually. The gothic is a seductive but slippery genre, as much emotion as form: you’d be hard pressed to find two academics agreeing wholly on its definition. Often, novels are claimed for the gothic because of a creaking stair or an imperilled maiden; yet true gothic lies not merely in tropes – though these are to be prized – but in an expression of transgression, madness or desire that makes the unnerved reader complicit in the tale. With the publication of Andrew Michael Hurley’s debut The Loney, every gothic bookshelf must make room for a new addition.