The 1970s was a good decade to be a child if you happened to be drawn to the glossy exotica of American comic books. Not only were its first five years a particularly fertile time for the emergence of new artistic talent, but the horror anthology, its dark wings clipped as a result of their congressional demonisation by Dr Fredric Wertham in the 1950s, was beginning to take flight again.
Titles such as The House of Mystery and its twin The House of Secrets began, with increasing assurance, to eschew the anodyne and the moralistic in order to publish short stories of twisty disquiet across a range of genres, from the literary gothic to the more contemporary. As responsible as anyone for the recent re-emergence of folk-horror, Andrew Michael Hurley’s Barrowbeck, though more rigorous in its conception and less hectic in its writing, evokes these distant cousins at their very best.
Hurley’s conceit with Barrowbeck is to frame a narrative, not within the limited span of a human lifetime but across a geological scale. While each chapter in the novel can be regarded as a tale of the unexpected or the uncanny, the unnatural or the supernatural, ultimately the arc they describe, like some dark rainbow, is the history of a valley, possessed and possessing. Commencing in the times of shamanic rites, spanning centuries into the Common Era, time compresses as the story nears, and exceeds, the present day.
Simultaneously, genres shift and settle according to their temporal setting, affording Hurley the opportunity to demonstrate the undoubted breadth of his craft. An Afternoon Of Cake And Lemonade captures the particular darkness that lurked just below the comic book gloss and the sunshine surface of the 70s with pitiless exactitude. A show of charity, clothed in respectability, is revealed as a snare, baited by the powerful in order to have sport with their prey.
While miniatures of the art pivot into the unforeseen, Hurley’s stories at times nonetheless let in moments of transfiguring light. Hymns For Easter, set some four years after the end of what was then The Great War, a conflict supposed optimistically to end all wars, affords a glimpse of resurrection and healing through the rite of collective song. The prevailing darkness is leavened, too, by the sometimes striking beauty of his imagery. Seen through human eyes, the valley is a place in which trees are described as having ‘erupted with crows’.
It’s notable that, for all that the valley itself is evoked as rooted deep in malignity, an essence by implication more enduring than the Christian moralities that seek to wrest control from it, in stories such as The Strangest Case, almost without fail it’s those from outside its cursed reach who stir it into action. Evil, it seems, is xenophobic by nature.
Fittingly however, the tale which is arguably the most potent is the one which is also the most elusive in its allusions. Sisters, in which a serial human cuckoo seeks a resting place in the Barrowbeck nest, has all the beguiling oddness of a fairy tale, resisting reduction to Manichean certainties, its culmination offering the hope of an ambiguous redemption.
Turning a circle from prophecy to portent, from massacre to deluge, Hurley’s achievement is, like American craftsman of the weird H.P. Lovecraft before him, to put humanity in its place. Unlike Lovecraft, however, who set the species against the caprices of beings both unknown and unknowable, Hurley affords Homo Sapiens the grace of agency. If any moral can be derived from Barrowbeck, it is surely that the land we depend on has to be attended to at all costs, and that the illusion of holding dominion over it is exactly that – a trick that we play upon ourselves, a story in which the twist is our own comeuppance.
Barrowbeck is available to buy now
