Starve Acre & Andrew Michael Hurley’s Unparalleled Folk Horror Fiction

Andrew Michael Hurley’s third novel, Starve Acre, is due out from John Murray on the highly appropriate date of October 31, 2019. Hurley is the author of two prior novels—the critically acclaimed The Loney (2014) and Devil’s Day (2017)—both of which  fall loosely within the ‘folk horror’ subgenre. Fans of Hurley’s first two novels, and of folk horror in general, will be happy to hear that Starve Acre is positioned still more firmly within the folk horror tradition; it is a brilliant interweaving of psychological realism, folklore, and the haunting presence of the supernatural. I would put it in the company of some of M. R. James’s fiction, Daphne du Maurier’s ‘Don’t Look Now’ (1971, and Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 film), Piers Haggard’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), and Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (as well as Roman Polanski’s 1968 adaptation).

Andrew Michael Hurley’s Starve Acre, available October 31, 2019:

As the novel opens, Richard and Juliette Willoughby are struggling with the recent death of their five-year-old son, Ewan. The Willoughbys live at Starve Acre in the village of Stythewaite, having moved out of Leeds to take over Richard’s family home after the death of his mother. Juliette, in particular, felt that living in the small village would be better, healthier, for the children they would have. Once Ewan starts school, however, he changes, and soon the Willoughbys are being shut out of any sense of community they may have started to develop. Indeed, the locals become positively hostile.

Ewan’s change seems connected not only to his starting primary school but also to the field across the house from Starve Acre, a blasted field where things won’t grow. The more time Ewan spends in the field, the more erratic he becomes, and before his first year at school is over, his parents have to pull him out for an act of brutal violence. Soon, he is dead.

Hurley’s first novel,The Loney:

The principal plot of Starve Acre takes up the diverging stories of Juliette and Richard as they try to survive the death of their son. Juliette reaches out (via a friend) to the Beacons, a group of occultists who specialize in helping people with grief. There is a gathering at the Willoughbys’ house with the Beacons that offers Juliette a transformative experience. Richard remains skeptical. This scene in particular, with its occult ritual that draws together living and dead, and with its focus on the mother, evokes recent folk horror films A Dark Song (Liam Gavin, 2016) and Hereditary (Ari Aster, 2018). Hurley is tantalizingly ambiguous about what happens, though. Richard, who was there, does not know, and is baffled when Juliette and their friend Gordon tell him that they can’t explain what they saw. Richard saw nothing. But Juliette is changed from this moment on.

Conjuring up the dead in Hereditary

Richard’s response to grief is to dig: he digs in the field opposite their house and he digs through the boxes of books his father left behind in his study. And what Richard finds is an interwoven history and folklore of Starve Acre, Stythewaite, and the massive Styethewaite Oak that used to stand in the field opposite Starve Acre. It is in Richard’s story that the principal folk horror strands emerge in the novel. As he digs, Richard finally finds the long-buried Stythewaite Oak, as well as the skeleton of a hare—and these objects start to exert a magical influence on his life. At the same time, he unearths the history of what the tree was used for—the hangings of village sons.

In this part of the novel, Richard’s plot, Starve Acre intriguingly evokes the trees of M. R. James (especially ‘The Ash Tree’ and ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’); the demonic influence of the buried object found in the fields of The Blood on Satan’s Claw; and the importance of the hare in The Wicker Man, a hare that is for a while conflated with the missing child Rowan Morrison. All of these connections offer themselves to much more exploration.

The enigmatic hare in The Wicker Man

By the end of the novel, Juliette’s and Richard’s stories converge, which is where the echoes of Rosemary’s Baby come in.

The ending of Starve Acre has some intriguing resonances with the ending of Rosemary’s Baby

Like his earlier Devil’s Day in particular, Hurley adeptly braids together in Starve Acre different temporalities—the life of the Willoughbys both while Ewan was alive and after his death, as well as the long-buried history of Stythewaite and its famous oak tree. Richard and Juliette’s lives move inexorably forward while Richard digs into the past—and what he exhumes exerts ever more power over the present.

Hurley is also simply brilliant at walking that line between the rational and the supernatural. Starve Acre could be about demonic possession (of both humans and animals) and the resurrection of what’s dead. But it could also be about a scared and perhaps overly-controlling mother and two utterly grief- and guilt-stricken parents—and what their minds create out of these dark emotions. I would say that, in his ability to render the liminal space between the psychological and supernatural, Hurley most closely resembles Shirley Jackson, especially her The Haunting of Hill House (1959), along with Daphne du Maurier in her short story, ‘Don’t Look Now’. The supernatural typically escapes our ability to comprehend it, but then so do human emotions. As Hurley writes in Starve Acre, ‘There was nothing more remote than another person’s mind’.

The mysterious figure in red from Nicolas Roeg’s adaptation of Don’t Look Now

Starve Acre also manifests Hurley’s wonderful way of introducing folklore into his novels. The field across from Starve Acre was not only home to a massive oak tree but also to the ambiguous figure of Jack Grey, who was, as Hurley writes, ‘really just another Green Man or Robin Goodfellow or Hag o’ the Hay’. Or is Jack Grey something more sinister than these ‘friendly’ but ‘not entirely trustworthy’ figures? In Hurley’s earlier novel, Devil’s Day, the mythology of the devil that stalks the farming community of the Endlands—which they try to control through ritual—represents how people create folk tales to explain and contain things over which they actually have little control. As Hurley himself has said of Devil’s Day, ‘Life in the community is always precarious and unbalanced and ritual is a means of addressing that feeling’.[i] Rituals also emerge in Starve Acre precisely as a way of managing the precarity of life and the terrors of death.

Hurley’s Devil’s Day:

Andrew Michael Hurley is writing the very best folk horror fiction out there. In that, he has no rival. Indeed, he’s writing some of the best fiction period. His novels cannot be easily categorized. They are always luminous representations of human nature, in all its frailty, spliced together with the disconcerting power of the natural world and the myths and rituals by which we attempt to reconcile ourselves to that power. In the interstices of these things—human emotion, nature, ritual—Hurley offers glimpses of what we could call the supernatural.

[i] Personal communication, August 16, 2019.