This was a wonderfully eerie read. I was swept along by the pace of the novel, which seamlessly moves between time frames, never disorientating the reader. The sense of place was profound, and the thread of mystery that characterizes the story was intriguing. I thought the dialogue, in particular, was extremely effective was well written. Having, admittedly, been slightly disappointed with The Loney, I am most definitely a satisfied reader now.

John Pentacost is returning, as he does every autumn, to his families Lancashire farm where he will gather the sheep in from the moors and take part in the traditional rituals which will keep the sheep safe from the devil.

This year is different. He will be accompanied for the first time with his pregnant wife Katherine and they will bury his Grandfather, the Gaffer. The future of the farm is uncertain and John hopes that Katherine will feel as he does, that it is their duty to stay to help his father, and secure the farm for their children. What John does not expect is the resurfacing of old feuds, secrets and superstitions.

Hurley's debut novel, The Loney, was huge and won the Costa First Novel Award so expectations are understandably high for The Devil's Day.

Hurley is excellent at dealing with the numerous characters and I particularly liked that it was told from John's perspective, as he looks back to his own childhood. John remembers his mothers death, the persistent bullying he received from another local family, the Sturzakers, until finally he reveals his own secret, long buried at the back of his mind.

The community view outsiders with suspicion and John's wife Kat is no different. Their reluctance to accept her and her lack of understanding of the old ways push Kat to the edge, as she urges John to take her home. Will she stay or return to her cosy home is the question you ask yourself throughout the novel.

What captivated me from the start was the wonderful imagery. The bleak, remoteness of the moors, the swirling mists and driving snow leapt from the page, creating a deeply eerie and chilling feel to the novel. The graphic descriptions of animal killings may not be to everyone's taste but are suitably fitting to the story.

I particularly enjoyed his description of the rituals, which were both chilling and deeply disturbing, and did not make for comfortable reading. What I did find interesting was the ingrained suspicions held by the community and the fear that they often provoked.

This novel is primarily a story of family and the inherent secrets that bind them together. It is a story of a family that will stop at almost nothing to ensure their farms future survival, that will inevitably plunge them into the depths of superstition and sinister practices.

Hurley has written a deeply disturbing, gripping and evocative novel, perfect for the stormy autumnal days we find ourselves in.

This was a very likeable book. Engaging and interesting.

"In the wink of an eye, as quick as a flea,
The Devil he jumped from me to thee.
And only when the Devil had gone,
Did I know that he and I'd been one."

Devil's Day is beautifully written, but it didn't quite hit the mark for me; there's a good story in there but it was a bit lost in strange pacing, disconnected writing and a family dynamic that I didn't find that interesting.

Firstly, this is a slow paced book. Normally I don't mind a slow story, I often find the edge of the seat sort of books tiring. But Devil's Day is drowned in scene setting and description and it only really picks up in the last 20%, and then it seems to hurry and come to a conclusion too quickly.

The story also jumps around in time quite a bit without much warning which I found confusing, though I did like how it threaded through John's childhood.

I did like the supernatural element of Devil's Day, I wish there was a bit more of it. But it was subtly done and based on myth and legend, while also tying it into modern times. Hurley brings about the devilish element in all humans and that is perhaps the most frightening element of the story.

There is also some beautiful writing in Devil's Day, the sort that makes you stop and reread a sentence just to appreciate the skill. It is mostly in the description of the landscape, which is really where Hurley thrives, and you can feel the harshness and the beauty of the Endlands.

"It had always seemed a miraculous birth, the river, conjured out of the fells high above, made of nothing but damp air and rain, yet suddenly here and loud."

Threaded through Devil's Day is a sort of awe at the power of nature, and it's ability to not only provide but also destroy. John and his family are at the front line, trying to scrape out a living in a landscape that doesn't much care if they survive or not.

I really enjoyed the nature elements in the story but unfortunately I did not connect with the characters, especially the main character of John. I couldn't get a handle on him. At first he's the son who breaks from tradition and moves away, then he seems to become a completely different person, one that didn't have any strong characteristics to attach a personality to.

Despite my reservations with Devil's Day, I still found the standard of writing high, and there were sections that I was glued to. I still want to read The Loney.

My Rating: 3 Stars

I received a copy of Devil's Day via NetGalley in return for an honest review. My thanks to the author and publisher.

Andrew Michael Hurley is something of a genius in how he amps up the creep-factor in his writing about isolated rural traditions and village secrets. His phenomenally-successful novel “The Loney” was certainly one of the most atmospheric novels I read last year. New novel “Devil's Day” also produces that unsettling feeling which makes you fearfully look over your shoulder late at night. The narrative artfully plays upon superstitions and anxiety to draw the reader in. John returns to the remote Lancashire sheep-farming community he was raised in for the funeral of his grandfather “The Gaffer” and the annual local Devil's Day celebration. This is a ceremony where the devil is at first tempted in to spare him ravaging the sheep and then expelled back out into the barren moors. Meanwhile, John's pregnant wife Katherine is frequently bothered by a persistent rotting smell, there's a sick ram in the barn, local girl Grace exhibits psychic powers, an act of arson burns a large plot of land and a father recently released from jail has gone missing. This accumulation of details all build to make the reader frantically wonder what's really happening. Is there something supernatural about this environment or are these bizarre occurrences merely messing with our perception? The story builds to fantastically tense scenes and an eerily climatic ending.

This wouldn't be possible if it weren't for Hurley's talent for suffusing his story with a rich amount of detail. The landscape is magnificently described and the intricacies of farming life are vividly rendered. There's a certain beauty to this age-worn setting and its proud community, but there's a sense of ever-present dilapidation to it as well: “Living on farms was one endless round of maintenance. Nothing was ever finished. Nothing was ever settled. Nothing. Everyone here died in the midst of repairing something. Chores and damage were inherited.” The author describes the physically-taxing nature of farming life and how little profit there is in it. He also renders how this creates a long-lasting effect on people over time: '“The valley made placid men stubborn, just as it made ageing men older.” Hence, it's little wonder that John was drawn to move away and make a life for himself elsewhere. But his return to his homeland makes him to reconsider his family legacy and whether he should continue established traditions.

The thing which elevates this novel into being something other than a finely-rendered spooky story are the heartfelt questions about family life that it raises. Are we obligated to honour our ancestors by carrying on with their work or are we free to set out on our own? This is played out through John's narrative but his story which sifts between the past and present comes with hitches which gradually make us question his motives, viability and certain facts about his personal history. There are beautifully poignant moments when he considers how few details we can actually recall in our memories: “Like salt boiled out of water, these things remain. Everything else has evaporated.” We can draw multiple conclusions out of the fragments we get from John's past and the ending of the story. Like all the best riveting narratives whose exact meaning remains elusive, this novel has left me wanting to discuss it with other people so we can collectively try to tease out an answer for what really happened.

The descriptions of the valley are beautiful, and so good that you really have a living image of the place. Surprisingly, I found descriptions of the characters to lack depth. The book is long on descriptions and atmosphere, short on plot and pace. The book is based around a local custom, Devils Day, and the families that live in the valley. We soon know that something bad has happened in the past. There are a few inexplicable happenings, but these aren't fully developed and didn't spook me. I found my mind wandering while I was reading it. I think I personally prefer a faster paced read. And what a miserable bunch of people! I can't understand how or why we are meant to empathise with people who martyrishly spend their lives on the family farm, just because their ancestors did. I won't be looking out for the next book by A M Hurley.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing a Kindle copy for review. Cutting to the chase, this book repays the investment of the time spent reading it - always a meaningful criterion for me. Mr Hurley’s obvious skill in evoking mood, location and the different personalities of his characters is well demonstrated; his description of a disorienting walk on the high moors in a blizzard, for example, will chill you to the bone and create a sense of foreboding over the fate that might befall those caught out in such conditions. My less positive reflections are, perhaps, more personal. The semi-supernatural theme running through the book lacked credibility for me. In part, this reflected my own upbringing in Clitheroe, the town mentioned frequently in the book, and my vacation work as a student on farms in the general area in which the story is set. The characters from Devil’s Day would have seemed more at home in a late nineteenth century hillbilly community in a remote area of Tennessee, rather than a broadly present day Lancashire farming community. There is a lesson for the author here - better to be less specific about location if the plot requires out-of-the-ordinary behaviours of key characters and unusual geography. Other reviewers have noted the author’s emerging tendency to leave questions unanswered - the character of Grace in this novel is a particular case in point, as is the rather bizarre acceptance of serious criminal acts that would surely have had consequences. Notwithstanding these minor grumbles there is much to like about Mr Hurley’s writing and I would recommend this book.

I was sent a copy of Devil’s Day by Andrew Michael Hurley to read and review by NetGalley.
Devil’s Day is the second novel by Andrew Michael Hurley and it has a very similar feel about it to his first, The Loney. It has a real sense of place; this book is as much about the landscape as the people who inhabit it. It is about tradition and family, duty and guilt, all intertwined with ‘The Owd Man’ the Devil.
The novel is written in the first person with the voice of protagonist John Pentecost who with his new wife Katherine returns to his family home for his grandfather’s funeral and stays for the annual ‘gathering’ of the sheep at the onset of winter. The story moves quite seamlessly between the present and the past with memories of John’s childhood along with tales of the history of the Endlands. Full of atmosphere and superstition with a diverse cast of characters Devil’s Day will pull you into an all but forgotten world traditionally handed down from father to son. Enjoy!

In Devil’s Day, Andrew Michael Hurley has produced a gothic tale of the Lancashire Moors.
John Pentecost, narrator, has eschewed the isolated farming life of his forbears, and returns to the family farm to help during busy seasons. Eventually, he begins to feel a pull back towards his roots. He tells his tale interspersed with stories of his father and grandfather.
This is a beautifully written but slow- moving book. It appears to be without any plot until about two thirds of the way through, when an unexpected spell of severe weather on Gathering Day might end in tragedy. This novel is atmospheric. oppressive, gloomy and bleak, but any feeling of implied horror is largely missing. It is difficult to associate with any of the characters, none of whom is developed in great depth, and the relationships between them are confusing.
The lyrical prose carries the day, but it was touch and go.
With thanks to Netgalley and John Murray Press

This is the second book I have read by Andrew Michael Hurley. I absolutely loved ‘The Loney’ so I was really excited to see another book by him.

Like ‘The Loney’, ‘Devil’s Day’ cannot be described as a light, cheerful read! If anything it is a darker and even more atmospheric story- but that is what makes it such a haunting read.

John Pentecost goes back every year to help with the sheep gathering at the farm where generations of his family have lived. This year he is also returning with his newly pregnant wife and for the funeral of the Gaffer, his grandfather. This remote part of England caught between Yorkshire and Lancashire hasn’t changed much in hundreds of years. Old tales and old traditions as well as old fears linger here like the damp.

The story switches from past to present and carries with it an air of menace- could there be a happy ending to it?

This is not a book for everyone. It doesn’t have a straightforward story, nor does it come to a satisfactory end. It does have atmosphere and a scary magic all its own & I loved it. Thanks to Netgalley & the publisher for letting me read it- can’t wait for the next one!

This is a book which succeeds in being lyrical, in its language and description, bleak in terms of its depiction of rural life in Lancashire, and menacing - in every sense, both the humans and the landscape.
I didn't find it an easy read, but it is worthwhile, whilst also being challenging. My main reservation is about the structure, which is (no doubt deliberately with a writer of this calibre) disconnected and slightly rambling. I would have found it easier to engage with a tighter structure.

Atmospheric and wonderfully intriguing. Love love love

This is a book about a part of Lancashire, Briardale Valley. The book is told entirely through John Pentecost's eyes, as he returns to the farm in which he grew up, to help fetch the sheep down from the moors ready for winter. He returns every year, but this time he brings his new wife, Kat, who has just discovered she is pregnant. The couple return just after the death of John's grandfather, who everyone called Gaffer.
The main character in this book is really the place in which it takes place. The area known as the Endlands is a harsh, unforgiving area in which to live and work, but John's family have been doing this for generations, and now that John is married and going to have a family, he expects to return to live and work there too.
The local families get together to gather the sheep, and also to partake in a ritual known as Devil's Day, where they remember times past when the devil came to the moors and killed the sheep, and some of the people.
The ritual is done to keep him away for another year.
This was a beautifully written piece of work. But it does meander along, not really going anywhere, and the timeline is all over the place, which at times was a little annoying. Also the fact that John seemed to expect his wife to come to a place that was as bleak as the Endlands i really couldn't understand.
I felt that the reader didn't get to know any of the characters really, they were quite flat I thought, and I think that if there had been any of the book from Kat's point of view I think I would have liked it more. Because that didn't happen I was left frustrated by the end of the book.
Many thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for letting me read this.

Better than his first.. the horror creeps in brilliantly as events overtake ..

Raw, absorbing, and heartfelt. This is a book about the advantages and disadvantages of living in a small community deeply steeped in local tradition.

After the unexpected success of The Loney, high expectations surround Andrew Michael Hurley's second novel. Can it possibly live up to his award-winning debut? In my opinion, it certainly does (and then some), but it is a very different animal. Readers hopeful that Hurley would continue to mine the seam of folk horror and weird fiction he so effectively employed in The Loney might be a little disappointed. Owing much to its rural setting, Devil's Day is a story about family and nature, imbued with unrest and tragedy; a bucolic tale that may owe a greater debt to Hardy than Aickman.

John Pentecost belongs to a Lancashire sheep farming family. Though he's moved away to Suffolk and married Kat, he feels a deep connection to his home community, the Endlands (the small cluster of farms, kept by the same families since time immemorial, can hardly be called a town). Yet the place also holds difficult memories: of being bullied as a boy, his mother's death, the strained relationship he has with his taciturn father. When his grandfather – a colourful local character known to all the Endlands as 'the Gaffer' – passes away, John is compelled to return home.

Local legend has it that a hundred years ago, the Devil disguised himself among the farmers' flocks and brought a terrible snowstorm to the valley. Thirteen people died – a catastrophic loss for such a small community. In the aftermath, a number of odd customs sprang up, and the Endlanders still observe them. Devil's Day comes after the Gathering (when the sheep are rounded up and brought down from the moors), falling around the same date as Halloween. The prize ram is crowned with a handmade wreath; there's a bonfire, and a stew made with the first lamb of spring; everyone is expected to dance and sing along to traditional rhymes. The Endlanders regard Kat with suspicion; for her part, she finds the apparent sincerity of their superstitious beliefs bemusing. John is more cautious. He doesn't necessarily believe in Devil's Day, but seems to find it wise to participate... just in case.

Needless to say, the Endlands is remote and old-fashioned. It seems almost to exist outside time. My craving for the macabre dissolved as I found instead a more subtle evocation of dread in which attention to detail, the authenticity of the context, is key. Every moment of Devil's Day feels genuine; Hurley's restraint and ability to pace his story are awe-inspiring. There are quirks of language that recall The Loney. John's parents are always 'Mam and Dadda'; the Endlanders often refer to the Devil as 'the Owd Feller'. The place names are redolent of history and folklore – Fiendsdale Clough, Archangel Back, Reaper's Walk. The setting, its otherness, emerges as inherently uncanny. (For John, literally: this place is his home, yet he is forced to see it through the eyes of an outsider, his wife.)

At its heart, this is a novel about the relationship between man and nature. One might conclude that there is no God here, only the fruits of the land; no Devil, only the whims of the weather. 'Nothing was ever settled,' says John: 'Everyone here died in the midst of repairing something.' The 'corrosive urges of nature' are always trying to reclaim the farms. When we glimpse anything unnerving, unnatural, those moments are all the more powerful and strange for being contained within this pastoral diorama. Even the closing scene, ostensibly hopeful, is not without an underlying note of horror.

I enjoyed The Loney, but Hurley's sophomore novel is better in every way. I wanted to turn back to page one and start all over again the moment I finished it. For me, Devil's Day is one of the finest books of the year.

Beautiful writing but I really struggled with this to be honest. I felt as if I was struggling with the timeframe and who was connected to who in the characters. Not for me I'm afraid.

Beautifully written, the reader is transported to a wild, remote and poor community where life can be extreme. Atmospheric and dark, this is no romantic tale of a life in the countryside but a realistic account of tough lives lived in similar ways throughout the ages. Superstition and old wives tales feed the imaginations of all who dwell here and the Devil is blamed for all that is not understood. The story, never really ends and could continue as life continues but the descriptive writing sets the scene so vividly it is well worth indulging in this book. Personally, I would like a little more completeness to the back story to elevate this to a truly classic novel.

I really loved Andrew's previous book The Loney, so I was very much looking forward to reading this new one. I'm not really sure how I feel about it. Slightly disappointed, in that it doesn't have the same impact of being unnerved as with the first one. That's not to say that the writing is badly written - he writes impeccably well. It's just that for the first half of the book, I skimmed many pages and really, when I got to the end, the pages I'd skimmed could really have been cut out altogether. I wasn't drawn into the story as much as with The Loney, and only really enjoyed about the last half or even quarter. That's probably because that's where most of the action was - the rest was a large amount of descriptive text of surrounding landscapes, nature and historical characters, which I wasn't really interested in. There was also a lot of jumping around timewise, and sometimes I found myself reading a paragraph and not knowing if we were still in the past or back in the present.

John and his new wife Kat travel from Suffolk to John's dad's farm near Lancashire, where every year they go through a ritual of rounding up the sheep from the moors and bringing them down to the farm out of the harshness of the winter weather. They then put on a sumptuous feast and call the Devil in to fill his stomach with food and wine so that he'll go away, sleep and forget to take sheep or cattle. This is called Devil's Day. However, this particular year, things have happened within the village which have caused fear and tension amongst the neighbours, and John and Kat's first Devil's Day together will be one they will never forget.

I was very impressed by, “The Loney,” and so I was interested to read Andrew Michael Hurley’s latest offering, “Devil’s Day.” Again, we have a bleak and isolated community; in this case, The Endlands, where John Pentecost grew up as a boy. Now he is returning, with his pregnant wife, Kat, for the funeral of his grandfather, ‘the Gaffer.’

One hundred years ago, the locals believe that the devil got into a sheep in the Endlands. Those in the local village of Underclough blamed the farmers for the bad luck that befell them. Shortly after the Gaffer’s funeral, it is the Gathering, when the Gaffer would reset the boundaries of the land and locals would celebrate ‘Devil’s Day,’ with their own songs, superstitions and celebrations. For Kat, feeling out of her depth and unused to the locals, this is a time she is looking forward to just passing, so she can get back to normal life. However, for John, the land, the place and the memories of the Endlands are calling him home…

This is a dark and disturbing tale of secrets, both past and present. As the novel progresses and you begin to get insights into the locals lives, their feuds, past and present, their motivations, their self sufficient lifestyle, their history and their protective secrecy, you have a sense of unease which only grows as the book progresses. This is beautifully written, well realised and I am full of admiration for Hurley as an author. Without doubt, this would be an excellent choice for a reading group, with lots to discuss. I received a copy of this book from the publisher, via NetGalley, for review.