Saltwash

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What to expect

'Wildly atmospheric and truly chilling' Liz Jensen, Guardian

'Andrew Michael Hurley's spookiest novel yet . . . crunchingly arresting' The Times

'Folk horror for our times' Financial Times

'Charged with dread' TLS

ALL WILL BE FORGIVEN, IF ALL CAN BE FORGOTTEN.

The dilapidated seaside town of Saltwash isn't a place that Tom Shift would have chosen to come to at all, let alone on such a bleak November afternoon. But his new friend, Oliver Keele, has insisted on meeting for dinner at the Castle Hotel, where the owners, the Paleys, try their best to cling on to the glory days.

Both terminally ill, Tom and Oliver have been bound by the saddest of circumstances, though they have found some solace in writing to one another via a pen-pal scheme set up by their respective cancer clinics. So far, their friendship has been conducted solely through letters, with Oliver proving himself to be a treasury of literary quips and quotes. Yet, for all his flamboyance and verbosity, he is guarded, and Tom suspects that he is lonely and nomadic. And Oliver sees Tom for what he is too: a man haunted by guilt and desperate to try and atone in some way before it's too late.

Regret is what brings others to the Castle. Much to Tom's surprise, dozens more guests appear, dressed in their finest to take part in a prize draw that offers one person the chance of deliverance from their remorse. But does everyone deserve the opportunity?

Critics Review

'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.'
The Times
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.
Financial Times
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
Guardian
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
Irish Examiner
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
TLS
Really creepy
Times Radio
PRAISE FOR ANDREW MICHAEL HURLEY'S NOVELS
:
Fascinating and curiously seductive . . . there is a deep sense of darkness
Guardian, on BARROWBECK
Thrilling, unsettling, ominous . . . like a knock at the door on a dark evening
Irish Times, on BARROWBECK
Barrowbeck casts a real spell - or is it a curse?
Mail on Sunday, on BARROWBECK
Impeccable and beautifully drawn . . . Hurley has been rightly lauded in British folk-horror circles
Big Issue, on BARROWBECK
I will confidently predict that no reader will guess where it's heading . . . Hurley's ability to create a world that's like ours in many ways and really not in many others is again on full display
The Times, on STARVE ACRE
Superb . . . Hurley leads you up on to the moors . . . dropping sinister hints at devilment and demonic possession. Then he changes course, scuffs over prints in the snow, springs new villainies on you, and abandons you overnight inthe hills'
The Times, on DEVIL'S DAY
Full of unnerving horror . . . Amazing
Stephen King, on THE LONEY

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