From a collection of crime stories that were just as often horror to an outwardly appearing horror novel that's really more like literary fiction, fundamentally a study of grief. Then again, it is being published by Penguin, who are not particularly known for their horror range but world renowned for their literary fiction. This is the sort of book that might win awards, but they're far more likely to be in the literary world than the genre one, a Booker maybe instead of a Bram Stoker.

We find ourselves in England, up north in the Yorkshire Dales, where the Willoughbys, Richard and Juliette, have moved after inheriting the country house of the title. It's an obvious opportunity for them to get back to the land, to enjoy the peace and quiet of the countryside and have their young son Ewan grow up in a healthy environment. Well, the best laid plans of mice and men and all that. I remember moving to the Yorkshire countryside and Andrew Michael Hurley nails the insularity of that neck of the woods. They'll welcome you and treat you well but you're not one of them until at least three or four generations in.

We soon learn that the Willoughbys are struck by tragedy. Ewan dies suddenly and what follows is open to much interpretation, because there are two ways we can read it, one entirely natural and one supernatural, rooted in English superstition and folklore.

Richard handles his grief by delving into the history of the area, especially the field they own over the road, which once contained the fabled Stythewaite Oak, a vast and centuried tree that's also long gone. He decides to research it and dig to ascertain its precise location by discovering its root system, surely still there, even if the magnificence above ground is long gone. That he does so in a Yorkshire winter, hiding from the elements in a tent, is a sign of how far he's perhaps gone, but he does indeed find the roots. He also finds much in his research, working through his father's books and finding a series of woodprints depicting the oak and the use to which it was put.

Rather than distract herself from her grief by looking outward, Juliette dives inward. She refuses to acknowledge that Ewan is truly gone, insisting that she can still feel his presence. She won't get rid of any of his stuff and eventually moves into his room to be closer to his essence. Eventually, as the patient Richard and Juliette's well-meaning but overbearing sister Harrie press her on finding help, she calls in a local occult group, Mrs. Forde and the Beacons, who do manifest a change in her but not necessarily the one they aimed for.

The natural explanation for all this is grief, pure and simple. Richard and Juliette are distraught, a loss of an only child at the tender age of five not something easily managed by any couple. They're battling their grief in different ways, one channelling his energy into something else, the other in denial. Grief is a tormentor and it hits each of us differently, overwhelming some of us but merely needling others, maybe lessening over time but never going away entirely. We can only search for whatever coping mechanisms work for us and that's what the Willoughbys do.

What flavours that is that we start out believing that Ewan was a wonderful little boy, a sheer joy to be around, the apple in their eyes. Gradually, we learn that maybe Ewan wasn't quite the angel we initially thought. So he set fire to his bin because he didn't like the dark? That gives us one idea about him. Why did he hurt a girl at school? What did he do to a horse at the Spring Fair? We get a lot of ideas about Ewan, but he's dead for the entire book, so we're reliant on the perspectives of others, mostly Richard, who's inherently biased as the boy's loving father.

The question any reader has to ask is whether this explains away everything they'll read here. Are the supernatural events real or merely in the minds of the grieving? The most overt supernatural event has to do with the hare that Richard finds buried in the roots of the Stythwaite Oak, because if we believe his narration to be gospel, what this hare does is not remotely explainable. Either he is deluding himself in a highly consistent way or he's experiencing something supernatural. And, if we accept the latter, then we surely have to accept the way that the history he gradually uncovers backs it up down to the smallest detail.

It's all up to us, the reader, because Hurley is not going to come down on one side or the other. He's happy to pile on the evidence until even the most skeptical of us might start to bend towards that folk horror interpretation, but he'll never outright underline it as what happened. He wants us to decide from moment one. I'm stuck between the two, enjoying the pagan horror weirdness of the supernatural interpretation but acknowledging that this is literary fiction and that's likely just an overt device to flavour the natural interpretation, which is simply grief. But hey, it's up to me. And you. And everyone else.

While I was reading this, I found myself disappointed at how inexorably it works its way to what we were expecting all along. Sure, Hurley wraps it up with a particularly striking image that we likely didn't see coming, but the general sweep of the story ends exactly as we thought it would. I had an array of questions that he wasn't willing to answer because it's up to us. One of the reasons I felt a little disappointed was that I realised the two options he was giving us in the first half of the book. Why draw that out for another hundred pages if he wasn't going to give us anything more?

Thinking back to it as I write this up, a few weeks after reading it, I find that the characterisation in those last hundred pages, primarily of Richard but also of Juliette, adds enough that it all stayed with me. I'm at Starve Acre with them just as much now as I was when I turned that final page. It's a real achievement that none of it has faded. Sure, I've forgotten the names of various supporting characters, but they don't matter. I remember Ewan, who I never met, and I remember his parents and what they went through after he left them. I wonder how long all this will hang around in my head, because one measure of the quality of a character study like this is how long it stays before fading. Right now, Hurley's doing very well indeed. ~~ Hal C F Astell