Starve Acre

on landscape, ghosts and reading

Lately, I’ve found it difficult to read. It’s rare I finish a book. When I do, it leaves me with a fairly impassable feeling of my writing not being as good as said book. A feeling I am certainly not alone in, but one that corrodes nonetheless.

Slogging through drafting and redrafting can leach the joy out of words. They lose their magic as they’re shoehorned into a ‘final’ place; pasted and set in typed pages we so desperately need to be done. Done with. Finished. They never really are.

In this headspace, reading the work of others can send us into a tailspin. The inner critic pipes up, buoyed by its deceitful friend comparison. Every paragraph we read becomes an exercise in unfairly contrasting our work with the writing of folk we aspire towards. Our words mire, and we trudge further from where we need to be. At times, reading ceases to be a joyful or playful exercise.

Every so often, though, we pick up a book that energises and illuminates the words we’re struggling with. Then, there are paragraphs of synergy and echo. Certain turns of phrase muffle that inner voice of comparison and gently encourage us to write again. It’s alchemy at its finest, and the sort we all know the feeling of.

Enter Starve Acre by Andrew Michael Hurley.

Originally published in 2019, Hurley’s book is one of these bookseller-adored publications that passed me by in a flurry of newborns and my own shifting taste. Brain fog and birth trauma doesn’t leave much space for folk horror. Or does it?

A previous Waterstones ‘Book of the Month’ and the source material for Daniel Kokotajlo’s upcoming film release, it is by no means a secret hidden gem. The support and adoration for this book is high. I just hadn’t read it before now.

For me, Hurley’s writing sits alongside Max Porter, Daisy Johnson and Alan Garner and all of the best writers that weave intelligent folkoric strands through narratives of human angst, joy and longing. This lineage is taken up in one of my standout books of the year so far in

Ali Millar

’s Ava Anna Ada, transposing the horror beyond the garden gate into a blistering tale of climate anxiety and desperate picket-fencing. These stories remind us that every twist of a river can unravel our lives. Each rivulet of cloud holds a potential apocalypse.

The landscapes of these books both minimise and expose their inhabitants; laying bare the stretching psychological seams that let the horror in. Their fantastical elements are liminal; it doesn’t matter where the real and unreal truly lies. They tightrope perpetually along the uncanny, testing our psychological boundaries while questioning or celebrating human conditions such as memory, love and home.

In Starve Acre, we focus in on the affects of loss. The story centres around Juliette and Richard Willoughby who, having moved to Richard’s ancestral house Starve Acre, lose their only son Ewan at the age of five. The book unfolds around a series of revelations as we slowly understand what happened to the family in the titular halls and fields in the heart of the Yorkshire Dales.

The supernatural elements of the novel are kept within the realms of the folkloric, always tied to the land and the stories that sift the fields. As always, the local gives way to the universal. It is a story where grief is explored through a series of changelings; mutable creatures that melt like a treacle, seeping through the cracks that loss exposes.

They bleed.

They drown.

They bury.

They calsify.

They return.

Like all good liminal horrors, Starve Acre starts in the gaps stretched by a winter that goes on and on, ‘adding to itself day by day. Making the houses in the dale seem even more remote from one another than usual.’ Isolation is desolate and, after the immediacy of their tragedy, Richard and Juliette are retreating into the expanding horizon of a life without their son.

Burial and excavation are potent metaphors throughout. Richard is an archeologist, eager to unearth the secrets of his home that he knows to be beneath the barren fields. He digs for a fabled hangman’s tree and the whispered truths that gallow its branches. He finds bones and roots, and what he unearths ultimately brings horror into their home.

In contrast, Juliette wants to stay among the hidden. She submerges herself in the depths of her grief and the enfolding landscapes and histories of Starve Acre and its surroundings. She is lost in the empty promises of those who sit just between the veils, eager to pull her further into her despair and longing.

Grief becomes the prism through which this couple cannot fully see one another. It distorts them beyond recognition and keeps each shifting in a kaleidoscopic display of a relationship’s breakdown after child loss. It is truly, desperately sad reading.

I’m aware that a lot of this publication focuses on the condition of grief and its relationship to the natural world. I feel myself moving away from this slightly in the coming weeks, but I couldn’t let Starve Acre go without comment. It really, truly is one of the best articulations of living with grief that I have ever read.

And this is down to the way the book handles the feeling of distance and proximity, played out in this pendulum swing between the seen and unseen. Ewan’s presence is felt, although he is never fully a ghost. The ghosting occurs in the inability of his parents to truly reconcile his absence in the realm of the living.

I don’t want to give too much of the story away. Only that there is a great deal of doubling and replacement in this book. It voices the endless push and pull of grief; of wanting to keep somebody close whilst also willing away that which haunts you.

It’s one I’ll be thinking on for a long while, and I can already feel it shaping the next rewrite of my own work.

For fans of horror, landscape, 70s aesthetic and tales of loss.

K x