Book Review: Starve Acre by Andrew Michael Hurley (2019)
John Murray
(This review is spoiler-free.)
Once in a while you find a novel whose voice is so impeccably clear that you aren’t so much envisioning the story as feeling it play out like a memory. The author has given enough information–delivered in with such a degree of craft–that a reader’s brain can fill in all of the things that aren’t said, yet remain true, in lush detail. Starve Acre is one such book, and the moment I was introduced to Richard and Juliette, with their large English country house and pristinely-preserved deceased child’s bedroom, I could feel the holes in them, the burden of their sorrow, the questions they asked silently in nights spent staring into darkness. It was a remarkable setting in which to experience the horror that followed.
The rural property, called Starve Acre, is on the outskirts of a small Yorkshire village. In the empty field across the road, there once stood an enormous hanging tree known as the Stythewaite Oak. Depictions of gatherings and executions around the tree go back hundreds of years, and Richard, an academic away on from the university on bereavement, spends his time digging in the earth of the field, searching for the roots of the great oak as a way to corroborate the legend. There’s also a trickster figure called Jack Grey, a spirit akin to Springheel-heeled Jack or Black Annis, with whom the fabled hanging tree is connected in local lore.
The setup is exceptional, laying a solid foundation of local history with a few nods to England’s rich occult past while preserving enough blank space for the imagination to run wild. There’s no obvious thing to point to, no ghost in the halls of Starve Acre apart from the memory of their lost child, no ominous warning or garish threat. Richard and Juliette are people estranged from their own existence, and the property’s dark history is merely a cradle in which their grief can grow.
Then, for the first time, Richard finds something significant in the field, and what may well be a portion of the Stythewaite Oak’s root structure, while Juliette comes into company with a spiritualist who claims she can reconnect her with their lost son. Both of these events, and the fruits they bear, plunge Starve Acre in a murky madness from which Richard and Juliette may not emerge.
The novel is the best I’ve read in some time, marrying the strongest elements of Ramsey Campbell’s and Shirley Jackson’s respective styles together in what is very nearly a perfect horror novel. It is one of those novels where you become very conscious of the dwindling number of pages remaining, and when the story ends, you spend hours mulling over the mysteries that remain.
Score: 9.5
Strengths
Top-tier prose, excellent writing throughout
Hits of a lot of the familiar hallmarks of English folk horror, while also doing something unique
Rich characters, remarkably developed for what is a short novel
Weaknesses
May be a touch too literary for some readers
Keeps a number of mysteries–I would have gladly followed this novel for another 500 pages
You may also like: Adam Nevill, Henry James, Shirley Jackson, Ramsay Campbell
You can purchase Starve Acre on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or preferably, through a bookstore in your community.
