Andrew McKie

Our appetite for ‘folk horror’ appears to be insatiable

Andrew Michael Hurley once again taps into the vogue with his tale of a remote farmhouse, pagan practices and a sinister patch of sterile ground

issue 26 October 2019

This eerie, shortish book apparently had an earlier outing this year, when it purported to be a reissue of a 1972 ‘folk horror’ novel by Jonathan Buckley. Now John Murray reveal it as the third novel by Andrew Michael Hurley, whose gothic debut, The Loney, received widespread plaudits.

Folk horror, a term popularised by the actor and writer Mark Gatiss, is one of those definitions, like ‘new weird’ or indeed, science fiction, useful to and immediately understood by those already familiar with the territory, but harder to nail down.

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