“There’s not an inch of soil that’s still alive.” Nothing grows on the land where the town hanging tree once stood in Andrew Michael Hurley’s folk horror novel Starve Acre. Originally published in the UK in 2019, Starve Acre is being newly released in the U.S. tomorrow, July 4.
Starve Acre centers on grieving father and history professor Richard Willoughby as he muddles through life at his old family estate of Starve Acre following the death of his five-year-old son Ewan. For Juliette, Richard’s wife, grief has driven her toward Spiritualism and a desperate desire to make contact with the spirit of her dead son. But Richard takes the opposite approach, trying to stave off thoughts of his son by throwing himself into work. When Richard’s university colleagues force him to take a sabbatical, he instead turns his obsessive productivity toward two personal projects. The first of these is the monumental task of reorganizing and cataloging his late father’s study, which once was the meticulously arranged library of a passionate autodidact but had been utterly trashed during the months of madness that preceded his father’s death. Richard conceives of his second project as a piece of scholarly research he’ll be able to impress his colleagues with when he returns to work, though mostly it’s just the perfect kind of repetitive labor that will empty his mind of thoughts: Each night, Richard methodically digs up a section of the moors across from his estate, searching for evidence of the legendary Stythwaite Oak. As busy as he keeps himself, unexpected little things still send Richard spiraling into reminiscences about his son. The strange events leading up to Ewan’s death are slowly woven into the narrative while Juliette and Richard each go further in their quests to reach beyond the veil and dig beneath the earth for answers to their grief. But they will ultimately find more than they bargained for buried in the sterile earth of Starve Acre.
Back in May, I included Starve Acre in a list of recent additions to the folk horror subgenre. As I mentioned in that post, works of folk horror often incorporate regional folk beliefs as a source of horror in the narrative—either folk beliefs that can be found in the real world or fictional ones that have been created by the author. Starve Acre is an example of the latter. The little village of Stythwaite, in which the book is set, has all sorts of local lore known only to the inhabitants. For example: the locals say that the hanging tree was struck down and the surrounding land made barren as a divine reprisal for the cruel and violent use to which the tree was put. But not all of the supernatural forces at work on this land have such strong ethical considerations. Stories abound about a malevolent entity called Jack Grey that lurks in the woods and peers through windows to frighten sleeping children. Richard dismisses these legends with an anthropologist’s detachment, lumping them into a category of vague entities like Robin Goodfellow or Hag o’ the Hay that add local color to the English countryside. But to Ewan, Jack Grey is all too real, visiting his room at night and whispering terrible things in his ear. Richard blames his neighbor Gordon for poisoning Ewan’s mind with superstition, but folk horror asks us to consider whether there might truly be powers beyond our understanding that come through to us in the form of local myth.
I’ve found that folk horror often goes hand in hand with a slow and subtle pace. Films like The Witch really take their time building up atmosphere and only slowly hinting at the terrors to come. Starve Acre is likewise a real slow-burn horror. It spends plenty of time wallowing with Richard in this grief and digging with him in the field and in his father’s study before we even see hints of something supernatural or scary. The horror is built piece by piece as the different narratives are woven together—what Richard uncovers in the dirt, what he finds among his father’s records, what Juliette experiences during her seance, and the strange behavior Ewan exhibited in the months leading up to his death. There are two mysteries at the heart of the story: What happened to Ewan? And, what happened to the Stythwaite Oak? The answers to both are connected in a way that only becomes clear at the end of the novel.
If you love slow-burn horror and British folk horror, I recommend checking out Starve Acre. You may want to pick it up now before the film adaptation comes out—at least, if you’re on Team Read-the-book-before-seeing-the-movie like I am. The adaptation is currently in production, starring Matt Smith and Morfydd Clark. You can find Starve Acre on shelves tomorrow at your favorite local retailer or preorder it online and support The Gothic Library in the process using this Bookshop.org affiliate link. Once you’ve read it, let me know your thoughts in the comments!