Saltwash

Crunchingly arresting . . . While his previous books have used the supernatural to convey the uncanniness of the world, here he cuts out the middleman and delivers the uncanny unmediated by anything beyond the human. The unexpected result is his spookiest novel. It's also, I'd suggest, the best

Andrew Michael Hurley has built his reputation on novels where the landscape itself seems alive . . . Saltwash pushes this further still, conjuring a desolate seaside town on the Lancashire coast as both stage and character, a place where the human and the elemental collapse into one another . . . Hurley is expert at withholding, at allowing the world to tilt degree by degree until the floor gives way . . . To reveal the precise terms of the ritual would be to rob the reader of that pleasure . . . A vision of England at the end of it's tether . . . This is folk horror for our moment, where the terror is not that the old gods might return, but that they have been living and working darkly within us all along

Wildy atmospheric . . . The driving animus of Hurley's fiction has always been place . . . he evokes the atmosphere and folklore of his settings with deft, idiosyncratic brushtrokes that bring the reader into territory as psychic, even mythic, as it is physical . . . The novel left me entertained, but also feeling raw, unsettled, existentially shaken. Welcoming on the outside, and increasingly unnerving as you reach the core of its gruesome, shocking proposition, Hurley's latest offering is Heart of Darkness wrapped in candy

Hurley's books are rooted in the gnarly traditions of English folk horror. There's a touch of MR James about Saltwash, and Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected . . . Hurley uses nature and architecture to construct an atmosphere at once foreboding and banal . . . Saltwash blends themes of decay both personal and general with a ticking tension

Charged with dread . . . taking place over the course of a single night in this restaurant, its sense of real-time duration adding to the slow-burn suspense that has made Hurley's novels justly renowned . . . an agonising tension reminiscent of Shirley Jackson

Really creepy

Andrew Michael Hurley serves up another helping of seaside desolation in his latest novel . . . the garish aesthetics of the backdrop heighten the uncanny sense of estrangement, as does the oddly generic quality of the dialogue . . . evoking a sense of eerie hollowness befitting the broken-spirited creatures who populate this tale . . . It's grisly denoument sets up a melancholy meditation on free will, absolution and the fragility of life

Hurley's evocative prose conjures an atmosphere of foreboding that is as much about the reader's fears as it is about the loneliness of the train station or the past misdeeds of the characters . . . Saltwash evokes some of the horror and menace of The Wicker Man . . . The sense of fear here is more unsettling, in the manner of some of Dahl's more macabre adult fiction, because it is rooted in the ordinary cycle of human life.

A novel of suspense that offers a fresh perspective on knowing our time on earth is finite

Hurley is a master of folk-horror, and he makes it known in Saltwash. His prose is . . . both high-octane and chilling to the bone. Saltwash is as forceful as a crashing ocean wave, and as compelling as an unrelenting current, pulling the reader in quick and fast, and adamantly refusing to release its commanding grip

Unsettling