Description
Book SynopsisBOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES, FT, METRO AND MAIL ON SUNDAY
''The new master of menace'' Sunday Times
After the blizzard of a century ago, it was weeks before anyone got in or out. By that time, what had happened there, what the Devil had done, was already fable.
Devil''s Day is a day for children now, of course. A tradition it''s easy to mock, from the outside. But it''s important to remember why we do what we do. It''s important to know what our grandfathers have passed down to us.
Because it''s hard to understand, if you''re not from the valley, how this place is in your blood.
That''s why I came back, with Kat; it wasn''t just because the Gaffer was dead.
Though that year we may have let the Devil in after all . . .
Trade ReviewHurley is a superb storyteller. He leads you up on to the moors, into the eye of a snowstorm, dropping little clues, sinister hints at devilment and demonic possession. Then he changes course, scuffs over the prints in the snow, springs new villainies on you, abandons you overnight in the hills * The Times *
The nebulous presence of the Devil is evoked so palpably in this novel that at times I hardly dared look up when reading for fear of seeing him grinning at me from the chair next to mine * Literary Review *
The new master of menace. This chilling follow-up to The Loney confirms its author as a writer to watch * Sunday Times *
Chilling and captivating; read at your peril * Stylist *
Beautifully captures a bleak landscape and the feeling of something evil and unknowable in the moors, the hills and the byways * Sunday Express *
Hurley is a fine writer, with concerns that place him a little to the left of the literary mainstream, a remove that makes him extremely interesting -- John Boyne * Irish Times *
This impeccably written novel tightens like a clammy hand around your throat * Daily Mail *
This is a story with pull. Its lively, building sense of evil is thoroughly entangled with the assumptions of the way of life depicted, that apparently timeless relationship of the smallholder and the moor * Guardian *
Makes for impressively uncomfortable reading * TLS *
A gorgeously written novel that leaves the reader wondering and perturbed * Metro *
Devil's Day is evocative and unsettling, exploring the potency of tradition, place and allegiance in a brutal rural environment * Daily Express *
The follow up to The Loney deploys myth, landscape and the tropes of horror to chilling effect * FT *
Andrew Michael Hurley's The Loney was one of the surprise stand-outs of last year, and a worthy winner of the Costa First Novel Award. His new novel, Devil's Day is equally good . . . it is a work of goose-flesh eeriness . . . Hurley's work is like a reincarnation of novels such as John Buchan's Witch Wood or the stories of M.R. James. His prose is precise and his eye gimlet * The Spectator *
A master of flesh-creeping menace. Around macabre happenings in a remote farming community on the bleak moors of the Lancashire-Yorkshire border, he weaves a terror tale of human vulnerability. Hidden horrors surface. Eerie malevolence flickers. Nature's routine cruelties are caught with a fierce accuracy that Ted Hughes would have admired * Sunday Times, Books of the Year *
Andrew Michael Hurley is adept at making his readers' spines tingle * The Times, Books of the Year *
Hurley's first novel was The Loney, a prize-winning gothic triumph produced by a Yorkshire press, later picked up by John Murray. Devil's Day shares the same dark sense of foreboding . . . laced with menace * Financial Times, Books of the Year *
Expect pastoral lyricism - snowstorms sweeping in across an ancient landscape - spliced with gothic shivers * Mail on Sunday, Books of the Year *
The devil is everywhere in this deliciously creepy second novel from the author of The Loney . . . Andrew Michael Hurley combines the eerie power of folk memory with a much more modern manifestation of horror and the final pages are among the most unsettling you'll read this year * Metro, Books of the Year *
