Saltwash Review by Andrew Michael Hurley – Dark Folk Horror Faces Death | imaginary

toLiving is hard emotional work – until you try to die. Alongside the rage that many terminally ill people feel against the dying of the light, there are the memories that come back to the skin of conscience: the failure of kindness, the misjudged words that could not be said, the feelings that were left disastrously unexpressed. Crimes of the heart – and sometimes worse.

A sense of remorse and a longing for forgiveness vibrates through Andrew Michael Hurley’s latest work of fiction, a deceptively simple story with a wild atmosphere that borrows tropes from cozy crime only to lure you into something deeper, darker, and more chilling.

The driving hostility of Hurley’s novels has always been there. In his first bestseller, The Loney, set in Morecambe Bay, and the works of folk horror that followed – Barrowbeck, Devil’s Day, Starve Acre – he conjures the atmosphere and folklore of his settings with deft, distinctive brushstrokes that bring the reader into territory that is psychological, even mythical, as much as physical. In Saltwash, the titular town in his new novel is a near-abandoned seaside resort whose estuary now “extends into a delta of dark streams and vast sandbanks,” and in whose tattered streets “neglect…is so widespread as to seem deliberate.” Saltwash is less a city than a state of mind: one that the novel’s septuagenarian hero, Tom Sheft, will have to consider during his brief but soul-stirring visit.

He arrives in the pouring rain for a meeting suggested by Oliver, a mercurial and mysterious pen pal brokered by the clinic where he goes for treatment. But Tom is drawn to their date at the dilapidated Castle Hotel as much by curiosity as by friendship. Why do Oliver’s letters, though full of literary references to mortality, shy away from the intended theme of their correspondence—that they both die?

As the distressed Tom waits for the distressed Oliver in the hotel bar—all moldy walls, rude staff, and peeling plaster—more elderly people appear, as if for a reunion. They are maniacally talkative, dressed in the trappings of their younger incarnations, cartoonish yet eerily believable, and as the booze flows it turns out that they are also waiting for Oliver, an annual party, the high point of which is a lottery.

When Oliver finally shows up, he immediately takes over the show, sprinkling beautiful words and performing magic tricks with a verve and skill that belies his unwashed clothes and skeletal appearance. As the night falls, Tom picks up vague hints about some of the other guests, but remains innocent, if increasingly uneasy, about their conflicts and machinations. However, as the meal is served—beginning with eel, celery, and tomato soup—a soup so vile that one attendee vomits—his feeling that he “needs to be that rare thing, a better person” begins to build an idea he cannot ignore. There is something very strange here. Why is Tom, the only newcomer to the annual gathering, prevented from learning more about the lottery? And why is everyone so desperate to win?

Easy to read but difficult to process, the novel left me entertained, but also feeling as raw, unstable, and existentially shaky as Tom, its miserable man. Perhaps this is exactly the intention. While Saltwash may not be the ideal Christmas gift for anyone facing death, it may be perfect for some unexamined souls. Welcome from the outside, and increasingly unsettling as you get to the heart of its lurid and shocking proposition, Hurley’s latest offering is a candy-coated Heart of Darkness.

Saltwash by Andrew Michael Hurley is published by John Murray (£16.99). To support The Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.