The Loney

by Andrew Michael Hurley Narrated by Richard Burnip

Overview

The eerie, suspenseful debut novel hailed by Stephen King as “an amazing piece of fiction” and taking the world by storm

When the remains of a young child are discovered during a winter storm on a stretch of the bleak Lancashire coastline known as the Loney, a man named Smith is forced to confront the terrifying and mysterious events that occurred forty years earlier when he visited the place as a boy. At that time, his devoutly Catholic mother was determined to find healing for Hanny, his disabled older brother. And so the family, along with members of their parish, embarked on an Easter pilgrimage to an ancient shrine.

But not all of the locals were pleased to see visitors in the area. And when the two brothers found their lives entangling with a glamorous couple staying at a nearby house, they became involved in more troubling rites. Smith feels he is the only one who knows the truth, and he must bear the burden of his knowledge-no matter the cost. Proclaimed by London's Sunday Telegraph as a “modern classic,” The Loney marks the arrival of an important new voice in fiction.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - Terrence Rafferty

…Hurley, unexpectedly, uses this lowering horror-movie place as the setting for a serious drama about the nature of faith. The terrors of this novel feel timeless, almost biblical: There are abominations here, and miracles.

Publishers Weekly

★ 03/07/2016
A palpable pall of menace hangs over British author Hurley’s thrilling first novel, narrated by a London boy, “Tonto” Smith, whose affectionate nickname was bestowed by a parish priest who likened himself to the Lone Ranger. Tonto and his family undertake an Easter pilgrimage to the Moorings, a house overlooking a treacherous swath of tide-swept Cumbrian coast known as the Loney. Smith’s devoutly Catholic mother hopes that taking the waters at the nearby shrine will cure his older brother, Hanny, of his lifelong muteness. But the Cumbrian landscape seems anything but godly: nature frequently manifests in its harshest state and the secretive locals seem beholden to primitive rites and traditions that mock the religious piety of the visitors. Adding to the mystery is Coldbarrow, a spit of land turned twice daily by the tides into an island, where a man, a woman, and a pregnant teenage girl have taken refuge in a gloomy house named Thessaly. Hurley (Cages and Other Stories) tantalizes the reader by keeping explanations for what is happening just out of reach, and depicting a natural world beyond understanding. His sensitive portrayal of Tonto and Hanny’s relationship and his insights into religious belief and faith give this eerie tale depth and gravity. Agent: Lucy Luck, Aitken Alexander Associates (U.K.). (May)

From the Publisher

Winner of the Costa First Novel Award A Sunday Times Exceptional Novel of 2015 A Best Book of 2015 by the Times and the Daily Mail   “It’s not just good, it’s great. An amazing piece of fiction.” —Stephen King “THE LONEY by Britain’s Andrew Michael Hurley likewise deals with the impact of damaged children on family life. During Easter Week, a deeply Catholic family travels to a distant shrine on the English coast, hoping to find a miracle cure for their mute older son. Miracles, they discover, do exist, but always at a cost. It’s hard to believe that this mysterious, richly atmospheric book is a first novel.”—Washington Post, “Horror novels are having a renaissance. Here’s what to read.” “A palpable pall of menace hangs over British author Hurley’s thrilling first novel, narrated by a London boy, “Tonto” Smith, whose affectionate nickname was bestowed by a parish priest who likened himself to the Lone Ranger. Tonto and his family undertake an Easter pilgrimage to the Moorings, a house overlooking a treacherous swath of tide-swept Cumbrian coast known as the Loney. Smith’s devoutly Catholic mother hopes that taking the waters at the nearby shrine will cure his older brother, Hanny, of his lifelong muteness. But the Cumbrian landscape seems anything but godly: nature frequently manifests in its rawest state and the secretive locals seem beholden to primitive rites and traditions that mock the religious piety of the visitors. Adding to the mystery is Coldbarrow, a spit of land turned twice daily by the tides into an island, where a man, a woman, and a pregnant teenage girl have taken refuge in a gloomy house named Thessaly. Hurley (Cages and Other Stories) tantalizes the reader by keeping explanations for what is happening just out of reach, and depicting a natural world beyond understanding. His sensitive portrayal of Tonto and Hanny’s relationship and his insights into religious belief and faith give this eerie tale depth and gravity.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review   “When a landslide during a winter storm reveals the body of an infant, the desolate Lancashire coastline known as the Loney is in the news, and the narrator called Smith realizes he must tell the story of his past there. Thirty years earlier Smith’s family and other church members undertook an Easter pilgrimage to an old shrine in order to “heal” his mute brother Hanny and reconvene with God. However, the adventure was one of clashing attitudes, strange locals, loud noises in the night, hidden locked rooms, and miracles that may not have been God’s will at all. First-time novelist Hurley weaves an intricate story of dark mystery and unwavering brotherly love that lends itself to many rereads. The characterizations are superb; even the Loney becomes a distinct character as it seems the place, not the people, is to blame for the bizarre happenings. Also, while religion plays a major role, the reference is more an observation of traditions. VERDICT: This eerily atmospheric and engrossing novel will captivate readers who like their fiction with a touch of the gothic.” —Library Journal, editor’s pick   “The Loney is one of the best novels I’ve read in years. From the very first page, I knew I was in the hands of a master. Atmospheric, psychologically astute, and saturated with the kind of electrifying wrongness that makes for pleasurably sleepless nights.” —Kelly Link, author ofGet in Trouble   “The Loney —

Library Journal

02/01/2016
When a landslide during a winter storm reveals the body of an infant, the desolate Lancashire coastline known as the Loney is in the news, and the narrator called Smith realizes he must tell the story of his past there. Forty years earlier Smith's family and other church members undertook an Easter pilgrimage to an old shrine in order to "heal" his mute brother Hanny and reconvene with God. However, the adventure was one of clashing attitudes, strange locals, loud noises in the night, hidden locked rooms, and miracles that may not have been God's will at all. First-time novelist Hurley weaves an intricate story of dark mystery and unwavering brotherly love that lends itself to many rereads. The characterizations are superb; even the Loney becomes a distinct character as it seems the place, not the people, is to blame for the bizarre happenings. Also, while religion plays a major role, the reference is more an observation of traditions. VERDICT This eerily atmospheric and engrossing novel will captivate readers who like their fiction with a touch of the gothic.—Natalie Browning, J. Sargeant Reynolds Community Coll. Lib., Richmond

JULY 2016 - AudioFile

Richard Burnip performs this moody, disturbing tale with skill and polish but does little to alleviate its excessively monotone atmosphere. A Catholic family with a learning-disabled boy makes an annual pilgrimage along with their priest and some other parishioners to a shrine at an isolated Cambrian seacoast spot called the Loney. They are intent on a miracle for the disabled boy, but passionately as they believe in unseen forces, they are unable to recognize undercurrents of threat and weirdness that surround them at the Loney. Every story needs foreground, middleground, and background, but the sameness of Burnip’s performance of men and women, adults and children, flattens these dimensions. Still the story greatly rewards attention. It is original, mysterious and powerful, and quite haunting. B.G. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2016-02-11
Years after a disturbing incident changes his life, a man finally tells the story of what happened to him and his brother in Hurley's tension-filled debut. Growing up with a strict Catholic mother, the two boys learn a version of fire-and-brimstone faith that is tested each year when the family and some other members of the church, including the local priest, travel to the remote Lancashire coast around Easter. The older boy, Hanny, has mental disabilities and refuses to talk, and his younger brother, the narrator, is one of the few who can communicate with him and who looks out for him, accepting him for who he is. Their mother hopes for a miracle every year that will "cure" Hanny, and she forces the whole group to fast and pray in hopes that he will begin to speak. Their last journey to the coast, when the boys are in their mid- and late teens, coincides with the death of the old priest and the hiring of a young, new one. At the Easter in question, the group is met by unfriendly locals, and soon they are hearing and seeing strange things in the woods, compounded by the arrival of a glamorous, mysterious family in the "big house" that lies beyond the Loney, a stretch of beach that sits underwater during high tides. The unforgiving landscape is a major point of the novel; its danger and isolation not only endanger the boys, but also emphasize the sense of dread that permeates every page. The weakness of the novel is the narrative voice: the narrator, speaking in flashback, describes the loneliness and horror very clearly, but the reader never gets a good sense of who he is. Mysterious and bleak, atmospheric and creepy—but, ironically, the novel lacks soul.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169577013
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	05/10/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

While they were going out, a man who was demon-possessed and could not talk was brought to Jesus. And when the demon was driven out, the man who had been mute spoke. The crowd was amazed and said, ‘Nothing like this has ever been seen in Israel.’ But the Pharisees said, ‘It is by the prince of demons that he drives out demons.’
—Matthew 9:32–34

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
—W. B. Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’
 


1
 
It had certainly been a wild end to the autumn. On the Heath a gale stripped the glorious blaze of colour from Kenwood to Parliament Hill in a matter of hours, leaving several old oaks and beeches dead. Mist and silence followed and then, after a few days, there was only the smell of rotting and bonfires.

I spent so long there with my notebook one afternoon noting down all that had fallen that I missed my session with Doctor Baxter. He told me not to worry. About the appointment or the trees. Both he and Nature would recover. Things were never as bad as they seemed.

I suppose he was right in a way. We’d been let off lightly. In the north, train lines had been submerged and whole villages swamped by brown river water. There had been pictures of folk bailing out their living rooms, dead cattle floating down an A road. Then, latterly, the news about the sudden landslide on Coldbarrow, and the baby they’d found tumbled down with the old house at the foot of the cliffs.

Coldbarrow. There was a name I hadn’t heard for a long time. Not for thirty years. No one I knew mentioned it any more and I’d tried very hard to forget it myself. But I suppose I always knew that what happened there wouldn’t stay hidden forever, no matter how much I wanted it to.

I lay down on my bed and thought about calling Hanny, wondering if he too had seen the news and whether it meant anything to him. I’d never really asked him what he remembered about the place. But what I would say, where I would begin, I didn’t know. And in any case he was a difficult man to get hold of. The church kept him so busy that he was always out ministering to the old and infirm or fulfilling his duties to one committee or another. I could hardly leave a message, not about this.

His book was on the shelf with the old paperbacks I’d been meaning to donate to the charity shop for years. I took it down and ran my finger over the embossed lettering of the title and then looked at the back cover. Hanny and Caroline in matching white shirts and the two boys, Michael and Peter, grinning and freckled, enclosed in their parents’ arms. The happy family of Pastor Andrew Smith.

The book had been published almost a decade ago now and the boys had grown up —Michael was starting in the upper sixth at Cardinal Hume and Peter was in his final year at Corpus Christi —but Hanny and Caroline looked much the same then as they did now. Youthful, settled, in love.

I went to put the book back on the shelf and noticed that there were some newspaper cuttings inside the dust jacket. Hanny visiting a hospice in Guildford. A review of his book in the Evening Standard. The Guardian interview that had really thrust him into the limelight. And the clipping from an American evangelical magazine when he’d gone over to do the Southern university circuit.

The success of My Second Life with God had taken everyone by surprise, not least Hanny himself. It was one of those books that —how did they put it in the paper? —captured the imagination, summed up the zeitgeist. That kind of thing. I suppose there must have been something in it that people liked. It had bounced around the top twenty of the bestsellers list for months and made his publisher a small fortune.

Everyone had heard of Pastor Smith even if they hadn’t read his book. And now, with the news from Coldbarrow, it seemed likely that they would be hearing of him again unless I got everything down on paper and struck the first blow, so to speak.
 
2
 
If it had another name, I never knew, but the locals called it the Loney —that strange nowhere between the Wyre and the Lune where Hanny and I went every Easter time with Mummer, Farther, Mr and Mrs Belderboss and Father Wilfred, the parish priest. It was our week of penitence and prayer in which we would make our confessions, visit Saint Anne’s shrine, and look for God in the emerging springtime, that, when it came, was hardly a spring at all; nothing so vibrant and effusive. It was more the soggy afterbirth of winter.
Dull and featureless it may have looked, but the Loney was a dangerous place. A wild and useless length of English coastline. A dead mouth of a bay that filled and emptied twice a day and made Coldbarrow —a desolate spit of land a mile off the coast —into an island. The tides could come in quicker than a horse could run and every year a few people drowned. Unlucky fishermen were blown off course and ran aground. Opportunist cocklepickers, ignorant of what they were dealing with, drove their trucks onto the sands at low tide and washed up weeks later with green faces and skin like lint.

Sometimes these tragedies made the news, but there was such an inevitability about the Loney’s cruelty that more often than not these souls went unremembered to join the countless others that had perished there over the centuries in trying to tame the place. The evidence of old industry was everywhere: breakwaters had been mashed to gravel by storms, jetties abandoned in the sludge and all that remained of the old causeway to Coldbarrow was a line of rotten black posts that gradually disappeared under the mud. And there were other, more mysterious structures —remnants of jerry-built shacks where they had once gutted mackerel for the markets inland, beacons with rusting fire-braces, the stump of a wooden lighthouse on the headland that had guided sailors and shepherds through the fickle shift of the sands.

But it was impossible to truly know the Loney. It changed with each influx and retreat of water and the neap tides would reveal the skeletons of those who thought they had read the place well enough to escape its insidious currents. There were animals, people sometimes, the remains of both once —a drover and his sheep cut off and drowned on the old crossing from Cumbria. And now, since their death, for a century or more, the Loney had been pushing their bones back inland, as if it were proving a point.
No one with any knowledge of the place ever went near the water. No one apart from us and Billy Tapper that is.

Billy was a local drunk. Everyone knew him. His fall from grace to failure was fixed like the weather into the mythology of the place, and he was nothing short of a gift to people like Mummer and Father Wilfred who used him as shorthand for what drink could do to a man. Billy Tapper wasn’t a person, but a punishment.

Legend had it that he had been a music teacher at a boys’ grammar school, or the head of a girls’ school in Scotland, or down south, or in Hull, somewhere, anywhere. His history varied from person to person, but that the drink had sent him mad was universally accepted and there were any number of stories about his eccentricities. He lived in a cave. He had killed someone in Whitehaven with a hammer. He had a daughter somewhere. He thought that collecting certain combinations of stones and shells made him invisible and would often stagger into the Bell and Anchor in Little Hagby, his pockets chinking with shingle, and try to drink from other people’s glasses, thinking that they couldn’t see him. Hence the dented nose.

I wasn’t sure how much of it was true, but it didn’t matter. Once you’d seen Billy Tapper, anything they said about him seemed possible.

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