Loved this story! A tense, gothic thriller which reminded me of Laura Purcell (The Corset, The Silent Companions), complete with a spooky old house, standoffish villagers, local folk tales and a troubled young boy who hears voices coming from the site of an ancient hanging tree.
Perfect for a rainy day as it’s a fairly short read, I would recommend Starve Acre for fans of gothic fiction and ghost stories. I’ll certainly be looking for more of the authors work.

A spooky, almost Gothic, story, horrific in parts and tender in others, I read it in a night and a half. I did like it, although I found the part where **SPOILER** the hare grew back very odd. Richard showed no surprise, no questioning at all, about this, despite his scathing disbelief in anything supernormal. It jarred with me, and I like the latter part of the book less because of it. But overall a book to recomment.

Starve Acre is a folklore horror about grief, faith, and guilt between two parents whose son suddenly dies. I feel so mixed about this book! While I found the characters pretty unlikable, this story is more than just about a family. Things get super weird! There’s a hare, old woodcuts, a buried oak tree. I have to admit I have so many questions by the end. Are the characters ill or are they haunted?

The plot isn’t terribly original. It employs familiar tropes of suspicious voices, children behaving strangely, haunted historical grounds. However, I found the blend of old folklore tales and modern parenting made for an unsettling read. The writing is lovely and elegant which makes the rare moments of violence and horror really distressing. And what a jaw-dropping ending! It gave me shivers. Recommended!

This is a suitably unsettling folk horror set in the bleak landscape of the Yorkshire Moors. It has so many hallmarks of Victorian Gothic, the tragic death of child, mysterious blights, spooky visitations, that it's quite jarring at times to remember that the setting is modern. Over the course of 250 pages, it rather lost it's punch and felt longer than it really was. Nevertheless, that last sentence scene was utterly chilling.

I struggled to decide whether I liked this book or not. The parents, Richard and Juliette are trying to cope with the death of their five year old son. It's unclear for most of the book how he died and the reader learns gradually that he was a very disturbed little boy. Throughout the book you are left wondering whether the events are down to mental illness or supernatural forces. There is a creepy atmosphere created by the author but, as it's such a short book, it's hard to really get involved with the characters.
I also found it a bit strange that a self confessed sceptic, Richard, would accept one particular event so readily.
This coupled with a very bizarre ending left me feeling a bit underwhelmed.
My thanks to Netgalley, the author and publisher for this copy.

3.5 Stars

Well, what can I say, that was a very weird story by the end! Not at all expected.

This is quite a quick read really and follows a family under extreme stress after the death of their 5 year old son. The story moves between the present day and the past, plus pieces together some of the history of a field on the families land where an enormous oak tree once grew and the son's aversion to going into the field, plus him hearing the local folklore legend Jack Grey telling him to do awful things to people and animals.

I received this book from Netgalley in return for a honest review.

Andrew Michael Hurley is a master of creating atmosphere within his stories. I loved Devil's Day and this next book did not disappoint at all! Tense, thrilling, bleak and brilliant.

Very dark! From the wonderfully evocative title to the disturbing final paragraph, this is a chilling read. Richard and Juliette move into their newly inherited home, Starve Acre, in rural Yorkshire with their young son. Sadly, and due to very ambiguous events, he dies. Juliette continues to feel his presence in the house and begins to display some very strange behaviour, which her sister and Richard try to remedy. The folk stories of the Stythwaite Oak and Jack Grey add to the sinister setting. Is everything due to paranormal activity? Or is it a family pushed to the brink of despair and madness by the loss of their son? You'll have to decide for yourself! Thank you to Andrew Michael Hurley, Net Galley, and the publisher, John Murray Press.

I thoroughly enjoyed this short novel! It manages to portray a family encircled by grief yet trying to become functional again alongside a supernatural setting without once leaving the plausible arena. No mean feat the magic realism inveigles its way into a story so readable and so recognisable that the reader is utterly caught up in the possibility suggested.
The bereaved couple occupy a property at once dark and elemental but also an enviable house for a young family; so filled with promise that the dashing of future hope seeps off the page. Andrew Michael Hurley has grown into his writing- there are some beautiful sentences here and for me it was the most accomplished work of his to date. I shall be recommending it to everyone I know for its beauty and its ability to lift you out of your own world straight into the sparse but well encapsulated world of Starve Acre.

Andrew Michael Hurley is a novelist whose work I've been meaning to pick up for a long time. The works 'Gothic', 'Folk horror' and 'haunting' are frequently attached to his books and his work has been compared to that of Du Maurier, with his debut, The Loney, winning the Costa First Novel Award.

Hurley's latest novel, Starve Acre, has been deemed by many as his best yet so I was keen to get reading when the opportunity to read an advanced copy via Netgalley UK came my way. 

Starve Acre is a folk-horror novel set amidst the desolate winter landscape of Yorkshire moors. Hurley is adept at describing landscape, rendering the barren countryside in sparse, precise prose. Take, for example, this passage from the book's opening:


'Overnight, snow had fallen thickly again in Croftendale and now in the morning the fells on the other side of the valley were pure white against the sky. Further down, where the sun had not yet reached, the wood by the beck was steeped in shadow and would stay cold all day. Nothing would linger there long. The freezing mist that was twined between the leafless beech and birch had already driven a hungry fox to seek food elsewhere. A line of deep paw prints came out of the gloom and into the pearly light that washed over the drifts on this side of the dale.'


Beautiful isn't it? I could just picture the scene before me and feel the chill in the air. 

Hurley's protagonists, Richard and Juliette, have moved into this bleak and desolate landscape, returning to Richard's childhood home Starve Acre to raise a family of their own. But, when their young son Ewan dies tragically, the house and surrounding fields end up haunted by the couple's remembrances - the ghost of Ewan filling the space that should have been alive with the sounds of the family that Richard and Juliette were so desperate to create. 

Hurley creates a complex and unsettling portrait of the grieving couple. Juliette, half-mad with loss and anger, turns to a group called The Beacons for solace, much to the annoyance of her pragmatic and practical sister, Harrie. Richard meanwhile, at a loss as to how to reach Juliette in her grief, has begun excavating the bones of a hare from the field across from Starve Acre and, in doing so, begins a fantastical series of events that soon spiral beyond his control. 

Blurring the lines between the real and the uncanny, Hurley turns Richard and Juliette's world on its head, using the hare to invoke not only the spirit of the troubled Ewan but the long-dead horrors of an old village folk-tale and a hanging tree.

And this, for me, is where the novel began to unravel. The first third of the novel, which introduces Richard and Juliette in their grief, describes the finding of the skeletal hare, and the loss of Ewan, is a masterclass in the build-up of tension. Hurley gradually layers up the uncanny, shifting between the everyday and the Gothic with accomplished skill. 

Once the Beacons have visited Starve Acre however, the novel takes a more fanciful turn. The lines between reality and fantasy blur further and, for me, the tension that was built in the first third vanished as I became lost in a quagmire of folklore and plot. I couldn't keep hold of all the strands Hurley was weaving together and, by the end of the book, felt disconnected from Richard and Juliette, their grief for Ewan lost amidst the tale of the long-dead Jack Grey, the occult dabblings of The Beacons, and the fantastical transformation of the hare.

It was if the characters were getting away from me, disappearing into the mist of the story in the same way that Juliette disappears into her grief. For some readers, I'm sure that this will only add to the sense of the uncanny but, for me, the lack of precision about how the various strands of the book connected together left me feeling frustrated. And the ending, which is suitably strange and unsettling, left me with many more questions than it did answers. 

Unfortunately, although certainly a thought-provoking and accomplished novel in many respects, Starve Acre didn't quite gel with me. Whilst the setting is gorgeously rendered and the writing enveloping in its beauty, the characters ultimately failed to resonate, the plot twisted away from me and the ending, appropriately enough given the chilling subject matter, left me feeling rather cold.

I would certainly read more from this author but, for me anyway, Starve Acre didn't quite fulfil the Gothic promise of its opening third.

An enjoyable read. I would place this book in a similar category as that of Stephen King. Intriguing to the end although I visualised a completely different ending. Was this disappointing? No but it left me wondering what would have happened next.

A very gripping and enthralling read that kept me hooked throughout and provided exactly the right balance of fantasy and suspense. The writing style is very captivating and really conjured up the snowy scenes and dark, ghostly woods. I found the ending a little unsatisfying but other than that a great read.

A thrilling chiller that will make you run through the book with a chill down your spine. Fully recommend for its poetic pose

Richard and Juliette are grieving the sudden loss of their 5 year old son Ewan. In this fabulous spooky, creepy and haunting story, you quietly learn what has happened to Ewan to bring them to where they are in present day. As such the story becomes more disturbing.
Starve Acre should have offered a remote and beautiful place to live, but is steeped in folklore about death as well as ominous goings on.
Both are dealing with grief in their own way. Neither is coping brilliantly well. Their despair and hollowness is palpable. It is apparent they will never be quite the same again. Isolated and failing to connect, the impact of this has a chilling impact. After a medium visits them no one is the same again.
Being a novella it gets into the story and characters quickly. Even so the pacing and character development is excellent. The dialogue is layered and loaded with poetic and hidden meaning. There is tension with an underlying supernatural twist, so you feel a sense of impending doom at the turn of every page.
Haunting, melancholic, eerie and thoroughly absorbing. It is extremely difficult to put down. The end is odd and satisfying horrifying. A true atmospheric and gothic horror to be completely enjoyed.
.

With his previous two novels, Andrew Hurley has proved himself to be excellent writer of modern day gothic horror stories. However, in this latest novella (think “Don’t Look Now” combined with an MR James ghost story), he has thrown in a serious pinch of early Stephen King and I am not sure that this really works in such a short book.

As you would expect from Mr Hurley, the book is beautifully written, the characters are vividly imagined and the plot development which has been well documented by other reviewers is excellent. However, the problem for me (without wanting to give away any spoilers) starts with the appearance of the hare. Up until that point, the portrait of grieving parents and the impact on their relationship of the unexplained death of their only child, seemed vivid and very real. But for me, the bunny bit simply didn’t work and was an unnecessary intrusion into a fine piece of writing. Perhaps in a longer novel, it may have worked more effectively but in a novella where the author is already exploring complex emotions and relationships, it just didn’t feel right. Letting a supernatural element hang over the plot like a fine mist would have been fine, but making it the centrepiece of the last part of the book jarred with the very believable story that the author was building.

However, I would not want this one criticism to put people off what is a very satisfying read from an author whose reputation is deservedly growing with each new work.

A quite short story which left me feeling quite unsettled. I usually read mostly at night and this is a book for daylight hours! I did enjoy it though the ending was rather weird. I will look for the author's previous books.

We all cope with grief in different ways. Some, like Richard, bury themselves in work and ‘projects’, pushing dark thoughts away in a kind of manic numbness. Others, like Juliette, focus entirely on what they have lost; as if by hoping and wishing and praying, or just performing the right sequence of actions, or wanting it enough, they can reverse the loss and everything will go back to what it was ‘before’.

Juliette’s sister is determined that Juliette can be jollied, or bullied, into moving on, but Juliette has found some spiritualists that she believes can help her move backwards instead. Richard just want to not think about it all, or deal with it all. He feels Juliette should just be left to get on with what she needs to do, and he will do the same. What he feels he needs to do is find an ancient hanging tree in the nearby field. But there are some very bad rumours about that particular field, and that tree…

Starve Acre is an eerie ghost story that carries with it the chill of winter and the bleak coldness of death in equal measures. It soon becomes clear that while both parents are focused on the loss of their young child; their house and the land around it has other ideas about what they need. Very, very dark ideas.

This isn’t a very long story – more of a novella than a novel – and the ending manages to be abrupt, unsettling and utterly haunting, after a long, slow build-up to the final shock.

Strangely, considering the tragic content and disturbing paranormal elements, the aspect of the book that stayed with me longest after I finished reading was Richard’s complete acceptance of his wife’s emotional derangement as everyone else attempted to change it. He is so clearly lost himself that he has lost sight of what is normal, or healthy, and simply accepts that wrongness is the new normal for both of them now. His calm support in the face of logic, his own beliefs, and a complete contradiction to his own coping mechanisms is both admirable and upsetting, and has haunted me more than any ghost!

Starve Acre is a gently insidious horror story that creeps in and makes a home in your brain, like a wild animal seeking shelter from the cold. Be sure before you let it in, because you can never go back to how things were ‘before’.



Richard left the sentence he’d been mulling over half typed, moved to the armchair next to the bookshelves and switched on the radio. One of the Brandenburg Concertos was in full flow. He put on his headphones and turned up the volume until the strings and horns were distorted, trying to lose himself in the noise and banish Ewan to the dark hole from which he had emerged. If he had to be absent, then why couldn’t he remain so? A blank could be coped with, just as a man might become used to a missing hand or foot and improvise a way of living until it became a habit and habit a kind of normality.

– Andrew Michaell Hurley, Starve Acre

Review by Steph Warren of Bookshine and Readbows blog

I've read three books in short succession where the story is told by jumping backwards and forwards in time and that are 95% reality and 5% supernatural. This was easily the best of the three, where the writing is concerned. The transition from past to present, though not marked with chapters, was very smooth. I never felt lost in the narrative for either storyline. And the supernatural element was done well and added a layer on discomfort.

I get frustrated when characters don't talk to one another about issues and there was a little bit of that, and I felt like I had worked out what was happening a step or two of the protagonist.

A good little story for people who want to be spooked at Hallowe'en, or who liked Pet Semetary.

I don't really have much to say about this book, except it was weird as Hell, but really good. Usually when a book takes on strange fantasy elements, I'm disappointed, but this one was so full of eerie suspense and without pomp or filler, that I kind of loved it. I'll look out for more from this author.

I was full of admiration for The Loney and Starve Acre didn't disappoint. Beautifully written with a brooding atmosphere of folk horror and spiralling grief. Andrew Hurley's knowledge of the English language still astounds and his sense of place is everything that I enjoy in a book. Fantastic read. Thank you