This is my first tilt at the new genre that’s making literary waves at the moment: folk horror. Which basically seems to mean creepy and slightly unsettling stories set in the British countryside with a strong descriptive vein running through them. Folk horror might be the new marketing term but really it’s a continuation of a long running vein of English writing: the stories in Barrowbeck are not so dissimilar in feel to the stories EF Benson wrote in the 1920s and ’30s, although Benson’s speciality was out-of-season English seaside resorts, which have their own thread of peculiar disquiet running through them even if nothing out of the way happens at all. Another influence is the film The Wicker Man, although without the 1970s sex that runs through the movie.

Hurley is an ambitious and atmospheric writer and the stories are well crafted and succeed in doing what he sets them to do. So I am trying to work out why it didn’t really work for me. There’s no lack of craft, quite the opposite. The stories do manage to hint at the unsettling and the out of kilter, suggesting rather than exemplifying. I think my problem is Barrowbeck itself. The stories are spread through time, from the village’s foundation to the near future, with the village and the valley in which it is set the only ongoing character. I think that’s where the problem lies. Barrowbeck. It doesn’t ring right with me. It’s supposed to be a dead end village at the end of a valley that no one visits. But it’s simply too big, has too many houses, shops, everything: it’s not a village, it’s a town of indeterminate and shifting size in a place where, we’re told, there’s only a village. Many that’s part of the story, that Barrowbeck itself is indeterminate, that it shifts. But I don’t think it is meant to be like that.

So, for me, that’s why the stories don’t quite work. It’s not the stories, it’s the place. But I do think the book is worth reading. If you do read it, let me know if you agree or disagree with me.