Book reviews: Barrowbeck, by Andrew Michael Hurley | An American Book of the Dead, by Kirsten Norrie

A new collection of dark, unsettling short stories from Andrew Michael Hurley contains some excellent individual pieces, but overall it is lacking in cohesion, writes Stuart Kelly

The derelict remains of Keeper's Lodge on Oxenhope Moor, West Yorkshire. The title of Andrew Michael Hurley's new book of short stories "conjures the hinterland between Lancashire and Yorkshire that the author has made his own" | Eileen Deste / English Heritage / Getty Images

One of my most-frequently leafed-through books is England on Fire: A Visual Journey through Albion’s Psychic Landscape, much as I am intrigued by the films of Powell and Pressburger, and Michael Reeves (woe betide anyone who adds a definitive article to Witchfinder General). Andrew Michael Hurley has certainly gouged his own niche into that particular aesthetic, beginning with The Loney and Starve Acre, now adapted into a film. His work also seems comparable to the perpetually rediscovered eerie provincialism of writers like Ross Raisin, Peter Hobbs, Nicola Barker and Sarah Perry, or the grim comedy of the parodic Discovering Scarfolk. At its best, Barrowbeck bears comparison with the work of Ramsey Campbell. This new work by Hurley, like Daisy Johnson’s The Hotel, began on the radio, a format with a particular affinity with horror.

The thirteen (of course) stories create a history of Barrowbeck from the time before recorded history into a possible future, and the name of the locale immediately conjures the hinterland between Lancashire and Yorkshire that Hurley has made his own. The “grab quote” is catchy: this is “a hard place to live. A harder place to leave”. (That does, inadvertently, conjure the motto in The League of Gentlemen, “Welcome to Royston Vasey: You’ll Never Leave!”) It is very much an anthology collection, in that the location is the determining connection; and what the book gains in diversity it loses slightly in cohesion. There is also a calendrical structure, but this feels imposed onto the material. It is understandable why Hurley did not treat the stories as separate pieces of evidence from which the reader can decode some primal curse, unshriven eminence or recurring vendetta: there is no coherent Upside Down in this Hawkins, Indiana. There are some excellent individual pieces but no galvanising charge across the disjecta membra.

Some of the best stories tremble of the verge of being genre at all. There is a feeling of things being askew, or just unplaceably off, even in moving pieces like “Hymns for Easter”, about the unveiling of the Great War memorial or the repressed grief and under-the-surface antagonism of “Celestial Event”. The weakest is probably “An Afternoon of Cake and Lemonade”, where the turn to being outright horror subtracts rather than enhances the story’s perceptive scepticism about ostentatious charity: “Venturing into the most squalid places to share Christ’s love, casting oneself down among the lowly, was all very well in Tony and Manningham, very likely necessary, but that was a mission for inner-city God-folk, not them”.

Hurley navigates the village as a place you escape to and from, a sanctuary and a prison, where the status of outsider or local is shifting, with subtlety. One story in particular, “Covenant”, would have benefitted from being maybe even three times as long, with the reader given time and space to reach the revelations; as is, it seems as rushed as the cataclysm with which it ends. In the early chapters, there is a tangible feeling of the physicality of place; the cloughs and gritstone, the litanies of plant names and fruit varieties. The body horror of “Natural Remedies” struck me as a little too blatant – radio sound effects would be infinitely better than verbal descriptions of the revelation – and the climate catastrophe at the end seems slightly op-ed (and vaguely reminiscent of the comic “Disaster 19901” when I was a child). But overall, there is much to admire here, even though I would like to see Hurley tackle something on a larger scale.

An American Book of the Dead is inspired by a real photograph – that of Robert McGee, who supposedly survived being scalped by native Americans in the latter half of the 19th century. Norrie’s novel takes on a distinctive form, being a séance conducted by the photographer, Ebenezer Henry for McGee, an unreliable maelstrom of stories. The combination of technology and occultism works exceptionally well, with the spirits being raised and fixed, dissolving and developing, all amid the “proxy wraiths” of cigar smoke.

As with her poetic works, the greatest virtue of Norrie’s writing is a singular lack of impersonation. There is no wry knowingness about the supernaturalism. The parade of characters allows Norrie – her Scottish background plays into ideas of second sight and self-mythologising – to conjure an America west of Mexican bordellos and Days of the Dead, whisky-addled fort commanders, wolf hunters, totems and raidroads, women cross-dressed as surgeons: it is as hallucinatory as the work of Malcolm Lowry and as blood-stained as the novels of Cormac McCarthy.

Norrie’s prose style is ornate but specific. One character laments, concerning her myopia, “Never saw who was looking at me. Never saw fit to peer at them back. Thought the world a greasy one”. The grammatical accuracy of the inversion is psychologically revealing, the image both poetic in itself and conveying a moral attitude towards the word.

The haunting nature of the book makes it far more than a historical curiosity. Its depiction of “scavenging on un-promised land”, the macabre pantomime of violence and appropriation is atavistic. After all, a parodic shaman nearly stormed the Capitol. The memes still have teeth.

Barrowbeck, by Andrew Michael Hurley, John Murray, £16.99

An American Book of the Dead, by Kirsten Norrie, Broken Sleep Books, £16.99