The Loney evokes perfectly a peculiarly English breed of hangdog provincialism, impregnated with a surreal horror and sense of imminent spiritual crisis that is all its own.

I totally agree that this book is an enigma but it is hard to decipher whether the inconsistencies result from the unreliable1st person account or just poor editing. Hurley suspends the story in a limbo between the supernatural and the merely strange: it is not clear whether the fantastic has occurred, or whether characters are mad, or which of these would be worse. Originally published by a small press in a run of just 300 copies, it went on to win the Costa best first novel of the year and book of the year at the British Book Industry awards. The story is disclosed in passages moving between the past and the deeper past; at all times the reader is conscious of the adult Smith as a man unable to slip the surly bonds of childhood.It draws as much from children’s fiction, folk music and horror cinema of the 1960s and 70s as it does from more traditionally gothic sources. When the old, lightening-struck tree has sprouted a new limb, the birds nest early, etc I think it is the generalized 'healing' that takes place on Easter weekends whenver Leonard, Laura, and the pregnant Else are summoned. At the same time, down in the nearest village – sitting in its valley, “dark and cramped like something buried at the bottom of a bog” – the local slaughtermen seem to be acting out an old grudge against the Endlands families. The landscape that I saw and felt when I was writing The Loney was one of co-existing opposites: then and now, buried and unearthed, permanent and transitory, real and unreal. Where the supernatural is most explicitly suggested (a hawthorn blooming well before its season, say), it is done almost in passing, so that one may begin to doubt one’s own experience of the novel.

The house where the retreat is to take place, Moorings, is a place singularly adrift from the modern world: an abandoned mansion perched on the edge of a benighted landscape where time has become clotted and stagnates, and the faith to which the pilgrims cling so ardently has long gone native and mated with the occult paganism that lurks in the woods. But as we see Father Bernard’s faith in action and how it differs from Mummer’s and Father Wilfred’s, as we begin discover the powerful and primitive beliefs of the people of the Lancashire countryside, we are drawn—as Tonto and Hanny are drawn—into questioning the nature of belief itself and our own relationship to faith. But in one of the most pivotal chapters of the novel – one that I enjoyed writing the most, in fact – Fr Wilfred understands that the Loney is utterly indifferent to him, to his flock, to human life in general. There's a mysterious death at the heart of the novel; complicated and destructive family relationships, and running through it all a story of faith and superstition, imagination and fear.Wolf House looks across the bay to the woody headland where the last wolf in England was reputedly killed, the motto on the coat of arms above the door perhaps a reply to a now forgotten dispute: homo homini lupus – “man is a wolf to his fellow man”.

B. Yeats poem, ‘The Second Coming’ - "And what rough beast, its hour come around at last / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? Andrew Michael Hurley so skilfully builds a sense of a tense, gloomy atmosphere and creates suspense that I felt wholly gripped and wanted to understand the mystery of what happened during this trip. The Loney is part of an English Gothic tradition running from the nuanced dread in Wilkie Collins to the ersatz satanic menace in Dennis Wheatley.

It's gone now, demolished to make way for flats, and much lamented by those who remember it, but I always thought Saint Jude's was a monstrocity. Fifteen-year-old Tonto and his older brother, Hanny, are, along with their parents, a Catholic priest and a small entourage of assorted oddballs, on their annual pilgrimage. But ultimately – and at its best – it’s a likably original thriller about faith, the destructive power of evangelism and the human potential for evil, in its most banal guises.

Though Manchester does have the Town Hall as a great gothic centrepiece and is, like other northern cities, haunted in a sense by the industrial buildings of the past. The Loney is narrated by Hannay's teenage brother, nicknamed Tonto by their shepherd priest, Fr Bernard.and exploring ideas of faith and belief" and "various wild, lonely places on the north west coast of Lancashire [. Defining characteristics of the gothic are wonderfully present and correct: the house falling into decrepitude; a girl’s face glimpsed at a wet window; villainy encroaching on innocence.