This wildly atmospheric tale of a party for dying people in a crumbling seaside hotel borrows tropes from cosy crime, but is truly chilling
L
iving is hard emotional work – until you try dying. Alongside the rage many terminally ill people feel against the dying of the light, there are the memories that return to flagellate the conscience: the failures of kindness, the misjudged words that can’t be unsaid, the feelings left catastrophically unexpressed. Crimes of the heart – and sometimes, worse.
The malaise of regret and the yearning for absolution vibrate through Andrew Michael Hurley’s latest work of fiction, a wildly atmospheric, deceptively simple tale that borrows tropes from cosy crime only to snare you into something deeper, darker and more chilling.
The driving animus of Hurley’s fiction has always been place. In his bestselling debut, The Loney, set in Morecambe Bay, and the folk-horror works that followed – Barrowbeck, Devil’s Day and Starve Acre – he evokes the atmosphere and folklore of his settings with deft, idiosyncratic brushstrokes that bring the reader into territory as psychic, even mythic, as it is physical. In Saltwash, the titular town of his new novel is a semi-abandoned coastal resort whose estuary has become “suckled down to a delta of dark streams and vast sandbanks”, and on whose tattered streets “the neglect … was so rife as to seem wilful”. Saltwash is not so much a town as a state of mind: one that the novel’s septuagenarian protagonist, Tom Shift, will be forced to reckon with during the course of his brief but soul-shaking visit.
