Richard and Juliette potter around their remote country house of Starve Acre, mourning the death of their young son, Ewan. But how did Ewan die - and can the mysterious Mrs Forde and the Beacons help them move on?
Andrew Michael Hurley’s third novel Starve Acre is a pretty decent horror story, which, given how hard it is to write anything good in this genre, is high praise in itself!
The book is drenched in morbidity. Past the woodcut-esque cover of a hanging tree, the main characters are mourning death, Richard’s father went mad in his last days before dying, their property and town has a history of strange and terrible deaths (the “Bonnie Sonnes”), and you’re wondering: who’s next? So Hurley effectively sets the atmosphere for his tale.
It’s definitely not the most exciting read though. Much of the first half is scene-setting - introducing the characters and premise, etc. - while waiting for Mrs Forde, the local psychic, to appear and do what she does, so it’s quite a passive narrative. Even in the second half, the story can’t be said to be gripping very often and almost nothing happens in the final 50 pages except to find out how Ewan died.
Which I will say becomes more compelling as the story progresses. I dismissed it at first as being part of the setup and not an important part in the overall mystery so it’s clever of Hurley to develop this aspect of the story to become bigger over time. Especially as Ewan, though dead from the outset, appears throughout via flashbacks to give us clues as to what happened to him. This also allows Hurley to build up the tension to the reveal by showing the reader Ewan’s increasingly troubling behaviour leading up to what we know will be his inevitable end.
Even when we do find out, Hurley leaves it open for interpretation as to how we want to believe it happened. As in, there’s the rational explanation and then the irrational one. The death itself too is vague and oddly contradictory. I really liked the ambiguity of it, playing into the unsettling eeriness of the gothic, supernatural subject matter.
Similarly, the big set-piece in the middle of the book with Mrs Forde isn’t rendered in a typically unimaginative Hollywood style you think of when you think of seances and the like. The scene is both vague, underwhelming, unclear and persistently puzzling - to its credit. It keeps us as an audience guessing as to what’s really going on - is Mrs Forde your average charlatan or is this how these things go if the person genuinely has “powers”?
That said, while Hurley handles some familiar elements in an intriguing way, his story is still filled with cliches of the genre: the haunted house, the cursed tree, the superstitious locals, the main character finding out terrible secrets via ye olde books, an evil spirit making people do things, most of which play out in predictable ways.
Richard’s quest to be searching for the hanging tree, picking up what his late mad father was doing, felt contrived, and it was weird that he didn’t mention what was happening with the hare - which was even weirder! - to anyone. The Grapes of Wrath-esque ending was weak and anticlimactic. The side characters were good though - their neighbour Gordon added some strong local colour and Harrie, Juliette’s sister, was a welcome source of antagonism throughout, to keep the narrative from lapsing into staleness.
It’s not as consistently inspired or exciting to read as I’d like it to be, but Starve Acre is a solid horror novel. Well-written with a couple of memorable scenes, good dialogue, creepy imagery that often resists the hamminess of mainstream horror stories (I’ma looking at you Uncle Stevie!) for understated, and more effective, macabre moments. It’s nowhere close to being as superlative as Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery or We Have Always Lived in the Castle, but it’s along those lines of similar rural horror - Starve Acre is worth checking out if you’re a horror fiction fan.
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