Review: Starve Acre (Andrew Michael Hurley, 2019)
This bleak and atmospheric folk horror novel unearths new horrors in old haunts
Cover illustration © Celia Hart
Somewhen in the 1970s, Richard and Juliette Willoughby moved to the Yorkshire countryside seeking a land of greenery and pleasantries in which to raise Ewan, their young son. Instead, Ewan dies and the land inherited by his grieving parents yields nothing but ghosts. The dour farmhouse and adjoining field – a mysteriously barren plot known hereabouts as ‘Starve Acre’ – becomes, like Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, a haunting symbol of shared psychosis.
“Another bend, a steeper rise, and then the lane flattened out and Starve Acre came into sight, its three storeys clad in heavy stone, the windows shuttered, the front door a utilitarian black. Happened upon like this, it was an ugly place, Richard always thought. A place to peer at from a moving car and let dwindle in the rear-view mirror thinking about the poor souls who lived there. On the edge of a moor, it was like a lighthouse, conspicuous and solitary. And now that Richard’s mother had gone, it felt as if the very last dregs of life there had dwindled away.”
Richard and Juliette are broken by grief, now as distant and inscrutable to each other as beings on either side of a Ouija board. Juliette believes she can hear her dead son scampering about their home. Desperate to contact him, she reaches out to a family friend connected to a coven of cosy occultists. Meanwhile, archaeology professor Richard buries himself in digging, compelled to search the field for his own father’s obsession: the remains of a legendary hanging tree.
Both seek answers, an explanation for their loss, but Starve Acre has nothing to give them but the unexplainable…