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A review by mana_elena
The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley
challenging
dark
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
I think the horror in this book does a good job of playing on expectations for what is right and "canny", so to speak, and impresses the audience by how wrong and uncanny it is, which I think suits the medium of a novel well and also saves it from relying on sheer excess and shock value to get a reaction. Some of the horror elements in the book are restrained and mundane in a way that could be present in a non-horror book. You could make an argument that this didn't need to be a horror book, and could have been just an introspective piece about truth, guilt, and belief, but I do think the drama of the horror setting emphasizes the distress of looking for order and perhaps even sympathy in the world or community around you and assessing what you need to have faith that it exists, and what could shake that faith.
While a fairly bleak book, I don't think it emphatically declares a right answer, and the narrator is not quite reliable, not quite unreliable. (I personally wish the elements of the story that suggest that the narrator may be unreliable were more evenly spread throughout the book, but I will grant that this would have changed the tone of the book in a way that the author may not have preferred.)
I enjoyed that the author made space in the story to humanize characters that had been largely unsympathetic. (Caution, mild spoiler?: I am thinking of one specific character, and I think the passage in which we get to see things from their perspective is built up as a moment of truth, but ultimately reveals nothing that was not already more or less known. This felt very fitting for the tone and content of the book and I thought it was executed quite well, but who am I to judge.)
While a fairly bleak book, I don't think it emphatically declares a right answer, and the narrator is not quite reliable, not quite unreliable. (I personally wish the elements of the story that suggest that the narrator may be unreliable were more evenly spread throughout the book, but I will grant that this would have changed the tone of the book in a way that the author may not have preferred.)
I enjoyed that the author made space in the story to humanize characters that had been largely unsympathetic. (Caution, mild spoiler?: I am thinking of one specific character, and I think the passage in which we get to see things from their perspective is built up as a moment of truth, but ultimately reveals nothing that was not already more or less known. This felt very fitting for the tone and content of the book and I thought it was executed quite well, but who am I to judge.)