It begins with the discovery of a child's body. Smith is the narrator of The Loney. He is looking back on events from his childhood and they are presented with all the innocence of the time and non of the hindsight of the adult. Drenched in atmosphere and relentlessly bleak, the Loney is an isolated, ominous and foreboding part of the northern coast where the incessant rain never stops. The book draws on some of the best in gothic literature in its storytelling. Smith who looks after his mute an...

I love many kinds of novels, but near the top of my list are the following: scary novels, coming-of-age novels, novels with a sense of place, novels with a gothic atmosphere, well-written novels, novels set in rural backwaters, novels featuring houses with secrets, novels with emotional depth, and novels which deal honestly with questions of faith in an age of eroding belief. How lucky I was to have found The Loney, Andrew Michael Hurley's first novel. His book is all the things listed above and...

Well deserved Costa First Novel Winner (2015)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 u...

Fantastic, dark read especially for Halloween and for those who are fans of the first season of True Detective, Just finished this for the second, maybe third? time. The slightly freaky build up in the first third has little tidbits you may not really note the first time through, but in hindsight, the first chapters contain foggy clues as to the nature of what is to come.ORIGINAL REVIEW: The Loney has me! A long, malevolent spit of sand reaching out into the cold Irish sea, the Loney also holds

I struggled with this story. I was never quite sure where it was going, or why it was going there. I felt I should have been more on edge than I was, and more shocked than I actually felt. It was dark, but not disturbing enough to really shock me, and it tiptoed around the edges of what was actually happening so that I came away wondering what I'd actually just read about. Not really to my taste.

I’m always wary towards every ideology people try to force on me. No matter what it may concern. Religious beliefs, political views, approach to abortion laws, capital punishment, to what I should read, listen to, watch. People have brains in order to use them, I guess. I don’t need preaching to be able to distinguish between good and evil, I don’t want my taxes being spent on populist actions of politicians, I don’t want to be threaten with every possible plague on the earth and hell fire after...

(Review originally published on my blog, May 2015)Was ever a book more suited to a grey and drizzly Bank Holiday weekend? (Which it was, when I read it.) Steeped in religious symbolism and quintessentially British bleakness, The Loney is an odd, dreary sort of horror story - the tale of two boys, our nameless narrator and his mute brother, Andrew, known as Hanny. The Loney is a place - a desolate stretch of northern coast, and one of a number of deliberately evocative place names in this story,

Ok Costa coffee drinkers, you voted it book of the year and I gave it a whirl but I just couldn't see it I'm afraid. For me this is one of those books that you finish and you think, did I miss something? Having now read some other reviews I'm happier that I'm not the only one in this boat. I'm not going to review this book as I feel another reviewer has summed it up perfectly in a one liner, 'was this a travel guide to Cumbria or a handbook on priesthood?'I'm losing faith in a lot of book awards...

When I finished The Loney I was thoroughly annoyed & felt that I’d wasted my time with a book that contrived to be a fast read that passed incredibly slowly. About three hours & a nap later what apparently had happened in the story jelled & I saw why one might compare it to The Wicker Man, as well as to some of the stories by Shirley Jackson and H. P. Lovecraft. From my current Christian perspective, this book is a story about two ways not to observe Easter: an extremely constricted & superstiti...

This was a solid 4 star read for me until about the last 15% and then it just fell apart. Way too heavy on the religious zealotry for my likes and it felt like there was this big build up and then nothing but a fizzle.

I feel like I'm missing something. So many people loved this book but unfortunately I'm just not one of them.This book was so slow! Nothing happens in the first half of the book it was boring to read because I just kept waiting and waiting for something to happen.I do think the author writes good characters and near the end it is more suspenseful but it's all wasted because of the confusion of the plot. Nothing is clarified. I have no explanations for why I'm supposed to care about things that h...

Astonishing literary fiction with a gothic dark undertone that had me alert from beginning to end. I read this in hours, unable to put it down and it's a powerfully written novel that doesn't need a fast pace or out of this world twists or in your face horror to get the story across to you. Mesmerising and disturbing.The Loney is a bleak place off the coast of Lancashire, England. A place steeped in history, religious belief and dark undercurrents. A pilgrimage is made back to this mournful plac...

This book is so good and so beautifully written, and I was surprised to learn that The Loney is Hurley's first novel. It is rare that I find a debut so polished, so near-perfect, and so atmospheric all at the same time; the sort of book I am beyond happy to find because it is so very different. I could go on and on with effluvient praise here, but I won't. The only negative thing I have to say about this book is about its ending, but by the time I got there I was already so entrenched in the sto...

The Loney with its mystical shrine, a mother full of religious fervor, taking her backward non talking son on a pilgrimage yearly hoping he would be healed. But the Looney is a strange place, a place where unexplained things seem to be happening. The questionable death of a priest, who lost his faith after the last pilgrimage.Atmospheric, but very slow paced, never felt like I got a good understanding of the characters, except for the religious themes. Actually there is much of this book I didn'...

Disappointing. Some half-decent descriptive prose undone by an almost non-existent plot. I reached page 280 before realising nothing had actually happened yet, and then, angry with myself for wasting precious reading time, I threw myself down the stairs. So now I've wasted two days on The Loney AND I've got a bad back. I don't know which I'm more depressed about.