The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley

Like Fell by Jenn Ashworth, this novel is set on the Lancashire coast, less than an hour from my home. There’s a brooding sense of menace from the outset and there’s little to redeem the unending bleakness and isolation of an area seemingly forgotten by the world. Says the protagonist, ‘I often thought there was too much time there. That the place was sick with it. Haunted by it. Time didn’t leak away as it should. There was nowhere for it to go and no modernity to hurry it along.’ The horrors that unfold in the darkness and decay of the Loney have stayed with me in the days since I closed the book for the last time. Chilling.