Devil's Day
Andrew Michael Hurley
John Murray, $32.99
John Pentecost and his wife Kat have gone home to the family farm deep in Lancashire to attend John's grandfather's funeral and to help with the annual task, the Gathering. But as the scrambled chronology of this story makes clear, there are some grim times ahead. Horror is a melodramatic genre and it takes a gifted writer to frighten the reader in any truly visceral way. It's hard to say quite how Andrew Michael Hurley does it but this novel is genuinely creepy. It starts out as a sort of high-culture Cold Comfort Farm without the jokes and the quaint rural traditions of the people in "the valley" being gently mocked, but quickly morphs into something stronger and stranger, and the reader is sucked into a world in which the devil seems simple and real.