𝕱𝖔𝖑𝖐 𝖍𝖔𝖗𝖗𝖔𝖗

The quintessential “bad place” is one of the staples of horror fiction. For Stephen King, the bad place – think the peculiar little town of Castle Rock or the Overlook Hotel in The Shining – most usually acts as a repository for a long-forgotten evil or injustice to resurface (often literally, like the dead cat from the desecrated Native American burial ground in Pet Sematary). For writers such as Robert Aickman, the nature of the bad place is more elusive, so deeply immured in time that its effects are felt more often than seen: a prickling at the back of the neck, a chilly intimation of doom that, when spoken aloud, is ignored or ridiculed by those who have so far managed to escape its spell.

So it is with Barrowbeck, a fictional village on the Lancashire-Yorkshire border that forms the centrepiece of Andrew Michael Hurley’s new collection of linked stories. We first approach Barrowbeck in midwinter. In First Footing, Celtic farmers have been driven from their homes on the Welsh border by Anglo-Saxon invaders. Desperately seeking shelter, they stumble into a narrow valley in a state of near-starvation. Their leader seeks counsel from the gods of earth, wind and water on whether he and his people will be allowed to stay. They are granted that permission, on the understanding that they will not own the land but be servants of it.

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As with Hurley’s previous work – his debut The Loney won the 2015 Costa Book of the Year, while his 2019 novel Starve Acre has recently been adapted for film – what distinguishes Barrowbeck as a piece of writing is its sense of place. Recurring characters and locations – Fitch Wood, Celts’ Cave, Pascal’s Fair – build the sense of a shared mythos, while the damp cellars and decaying outhouses, the teeming rain, the mossy roots of ancient trees, the grimly mouldering parlours and back rooms and hallways of houses in thrall to the past lend to the village itself a sense of inexorable decline.

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Barrowbeck began life as a series of 15-minute plays written for Radio 4, Voices in the Valley. Recasting them as a collection of stories has given Hurley the opportunity to bring greater complexity to his storylines as well as adding several new tales and strengthening the connections between them. There is also a deeper sense of darkness, with the elegiac tone of the radio series shifting towards outright horror: the passive memories of the pastor’s son in Pity morph into wilful deeds in An Afternoon of Cake and Lemonade. Similarly, the tragic accident that befalls a newcomer to the valley in A Celestial Event becomes a deliberate choice in the story’s written version. Even though some of these stories feel incomplete – Autumn Pastoral offers so many tantalising loose ends it could have been a novel in its own right – there is nonetheless a satisfying sense of continuity to the whole, a narrative arc that rewards the reader’s involvement and careful attention