The Old Ways

On Andrew Michael Hurley’s folk horror, ‘Devil’s Day.’

Currier and Ives illustration The Old Homestead in Winter, lithograph, 1864. (GettyImages)

THE RESURGENCE OF FOLK HORROR—an ancient subgenre of horror that concerns itself with nature and the attendant superstitions that mankind has connected to it—in recent years has been largely cinematic in nature. Examples include Robert Eggers’s tremendous film The Witch (2015), or Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019), the latter of which owes an immense debt to one of the towering folk horror films, Robin Hardy and Anthony Shaffer’s The Wicker Man (1973). This is a welcome change in the horror film landscape, though in my experience, in horror literature folk horror has never really fallen out of style. It’s always been there, though it’s been a while since it could be considered part of horror’s mainstream. One of the most recent folk horror novels to enjoy widespread success is Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, and that came out in 1983.

This hasn’t stopped serious horror writers from taking their own swings at it. One of the best and most prominent folk horror writers working today is the English writer Andrew Michael Hurley. Before turning to novels, Hurley published two collections of short stories, neither of which are easily acquired (I simply can’t find them, affordably priced or not). But since 2014, Hurley has written three novels, all of them folk horror: The Loney, Devil’s Day, and, most recently, Starve Acre (a film adaptation of which has been playing festivals overseas, to positive reviews). I’ve read all three, and I recommend each without reservation. Today, I want to focus exclusively on his second, Devil’s Day (2017), which I believe in some key ways is one of the purest, and most interesting, examples of folk horror that I’ve encountered in some time.

Devil’s Day begins with a brief account of a catastrophic blizzard that swept through a small village in England called the Endlands a century ago. In addition to the death and damage caused by the storm itself, we’re told that the worst part of the disaster was the presence of the Devil (who, it is said, brought on the blizzard in the first place). The Devil (more commonly known, in the dialect of the region, as the “Owd Feller”) could jump from person to person, even person to animal, wreaking further death and havoc, and it was impossible to know where he would land next:

Down in the farmlands, he flitted from one house to the next, too crafty to be caught, only manifest in what he infected. He was the maggot in the eye of the good dog, the cancer that rotted the ram’s gonads, the blood in the baby’s milk.

All of this is related to the reader by the novel’s narrator, John Pentecost. In telling this story, John is looking back on past events. When we meet him, he, his wife Kat, and his son Adam live in the Endlands, but most of the narrative takes place before Adam’s birth, in the days when John and Kat technically still lived in what we might call civilization. John and the pregnant Kat travel to the Endlands following the death of John’s grandfather, known as the Gaffer. They are there to attend the funeral, support John’s father (known as Dadda), and to take part in a local holiday, Devil’s Day, the roots of which trace back to that fateful blizzard.

Two things about this setup are particularly interesting. One is that, despite this small community’s belief in the Devil—a belief that is almost casual among them, an everyday facet of their lives, like the weather—any kind of religious faith that might once have ruled their descendants has since faded into nothing. There is one exception, an old woman named Laurel, whose faith seems almost arbitrary, or a kind of psychological defense mechanism, but otherwise in the Endlands, there is no God, only the Devil. These villagers do not worship the Devil—they want him out of their lives if possible—but they believe, they know, he is there.

The other interesting thing is the discovery of what kind of person John, our narrator, actually is. As far as his wife is concerned, their trip to the Endlands is merely a temporary function, a normal family duty. But John’s telling of this story makes it clear—and the novel’s early passages set in the present day confirm—that he intends to move his wife and unborn child back to this village permanently. He believes he can convince Kat that this is a good idea, she will come around, and she will learn to love this strange clutch of homes, these few families that make up a woodland community. But more than this, we understand that as far as John is concerned, they are going to stay, whether Kat likes it or not. Add to this the fact that, in relating aspects of his childhood, we learn that his childhood bully, Lennie Sturzaker, drowned when they were still children, and that though John didn’t kill him, the Devil told John it would happen. John remembers that moment:

The Devil stared at me and I looked away with the same feeling I had when Lennie spotted me from the far side of the playground. . . . But the Devil didn’t seem as if he wanted to do me any harm. . . .

As the Devil watched me, the same question ran through my mind as incessantly as the river. Did I like stories? Did I like stories?

I answered yes.

And did I want to know another? Did I want to see one played out before my eyes? Not in a book, but here in the Wood.

I did, I said.

I could see a boy die down here, if I wanted to . . .

And everything about the novel, save Kat and her unborn son, begins to quietly hone a sinister edge. “Quietly” being the key with Hurley and Devil’s Day. The novel is a very slow burn, and is all the better for it. Incidents occur, past incidents are referred to, and their strangeness and mysterious nature are allowed to deepen. One of the villagers, for instance, is a young girl named Grace. John’s wife Kat took a liking to her at their wedding, and when she and John return to the Endlands for the Gaffer’s funeral and Devil’s Day, the two reunite. But Grace has changed, is less carefree, more jagged in her attitudes and demeanor, though she’s still drawn to Kat. Kat worries about Grace, and wants to protect her, but on another level finds the girl somewhat disturbing. Grace appears to know things—for example, she knows Kat is pregnant before she or John has told anyone the news—that she shouldn’t. Grace’s dulled, sour attitude is chalked up by her mother, a rather mean and impatient woman named Liz, to, among other things, the absence of Jeff, Grace’s father. Jeff had done time in prison, and though out now, his work keeps him away from the Endlands for long periods. However, he is fully expected to be home by Devil’s Day.

Jeff’s absence is one of the more troubling mysteries in the novel, and its conclusion is among the novel’s most disturbing revelations. It serves, in fact, as a kind of climax, though little is resolved by what is eventually discovered.

Long stretches of Devil’s Day go by with little mention of anything sinister, or supernatural, and the novel can at times read as a kind of bleak backwoods drama. What makes it all work best as a horror novel is the tone; when those darker revelations are unearthed, the style, the mood, changes little. The way Hurley unfolds the infernal horrors of his story are written in much the same way as are the more grounded family and community conflicts. And why should it be any other way, when the person telling us about it all is John Pentecost, a man very much from and of the Endlands? He feels a certain guilt over having left his home village, leaving his father and grandfather to tend their farm alone, the two of them moving into middle and old age, while young John enjoys a more traditional and prosperous life in the city. John has no delusions about what the Endlands were, and are. He knows the Devil is real, the Devil has spoken to him. More than that, John also feels no guilt, no moral conflict, about any of the things he did, or witnessed, not about Lennie Sturzaker’s death or anything else. When Kat’s feelings about this community that raised her husband become disrupted, when she begins to feel frightened by the place, John’s reaction is to become frustrated by her. This is going to be her new home, regardless of whatever objections she might put forth. And because of the way Hurley begins his novel, the reader knows from the start that John is right.

Devil’s Day is a uniquely effective piece of folk horror, in large part because it doesn’t try to bring the subgenre into the modern age. The story may take part, mostly, in modern times, but its attitudes, its sense of myth and superstition and evil, both natural and supernatural, are almost ancient. Hurley has no interest in updating the aspect of folk horror that make up its core power. He knows better than to question the old ways.