Starve Acre by Andrew Michael Hurley

          It took me a little while to actually get in to the book as, initially, the words overpower the story.  The language and sentence construction I found to be initially offputting and it all smacked a little of a vanity project or as though this was a self-conscious attempt at writing literature.  After 20 or so pages I began to get used to the cadence of the narrator and realised that this wasn't the author intruding on the story, this was just the way that Richard was.  After 40 or so pages I couldn't have cared less, I was hooked deep in to the story.

There is something undeniably unsettling about the setting.  The lonely house on the Peak District moors, the barren field that once hosted a legendary oak tree.  The very remoteness of the setting puts you on edge and then to transplant a folk tale of a hanging bough and the shadowy Jack Grey on to this location just ups the ante even further.  Really The Beacons are just an adjunct to the tale, whilst Juliette sees them as vitally important and Richard dismisses them as charlatans to the reader I found they were neither here nor there.

What interested me was the relating of the changes in Ewan once he started at the village school.  How he moved from a happy, well adjusted child to a creature of fear was superbly handled and the parental confusion at this change in their little boy is well drawn on the page.  It is not so much his actions but his fear, his certainty that something is speaking to him, forcing him in to these behaviours and the way his parents initially dismiss his accounts and then start to fear this cuckoo in their midst that speaks to the reader.

The obsession of The Willoughby family is undoubtedly the oak tree.  It consumed Richard's father and now the search for evidence of it's existence seems to be consuming Richard.  There is something deeply unsettling about his obsessive digging in the barren field, perhaps more so than Juliette's obsession with contacting her dead son and her belief that he is still in the house.  The way in which grief has warped and worn them both is extremely well executed and heavily nuanced.

There is no, nice, neat little ending to the book.  In the tradition of the best ghost storys it leaves you on a knife edge.  Balanced between the nightmare the Willoughby's seem to now be accepting and inhabiting and the out and out shock value of that final sentence.  It leaves you wanting more and yet relieved that you can step out of the claustrophobic nightmare that is their home.

This book will stay with me for some time.  Not just because of how unsettling it all is but because of how cleverly crafted and constructed the story is.  There is no waste here, every word has been crafted to up the sense of unease and paranoia - maybe too well crafted as occassionally the author does peer through to the reader and spoils the tension.

THIS IS AN HONEST REVIEW OF A FREE COPY OF THE BOOK PROVIDED BY READERS FIRST.