Play Book Tag discussion

Well, that was chilling!!!!

A horror novel that provides far more questions than answers, The Loney is the best novel of the genre that I've read in awhile. It's got everything: religious cults, a creepy secluded setting, Victorian sanatoriums, an abusive mother, and a creepy mute kid. And those are just among the "good" guys!

The unnamed narrator, last name Smith, recalls an Easter thirty years past in the 70s. It was the last time he went to stay in a rented house called Moorings, once a TB sanatorium run by a taxidermist. Moorings stands on a desolate stretch of northern English coastline called the Loney. Nearby is a crumbling Catholic shrine, once known for healing the sick, now falling into obscurity. The narrator goes with his developmentally disabled brother Hanny, his parents, two other couples active in their Catholic church parish, St. Jude's, and the newly assigned parish priest, Father Bernard. They used to go to the shrine for Easter with St. Jude's previous priest, Father Wilfred, but haven't in some time. Esther, Hanny and the narrator's mother, is convinced the shrine will heal Hanny from his disability. But Father Wilfred died under mysterious circumstances. And the weather is just awful, and the locals seem strange and off-putting, and nothing is what it seems...

It is the perfect setup for a spooky story, and The Loney delivers. The book excels at presenting unsettling situations that could be completely ominous and evil, or simply mundane. For a long time, it's hard to tell which is which. But then some miraculous healing does start to happen, but at a terrible cost, and you're left to wonder whether the intervention is that of the divine, or something much darker.

If there is a book equivalent of cowering in your seat while the horror movie protagonist is definitely about to open the door to certain doom you know about but they don't, it is this novel. So many times I wanted to grab all the characters and shake them and tell them to get out of there. But of course, then it wouldn't be horror, would it?

I'm still not entirely clear what happened by the end, but I think it's scarier not knowing, and the author knows this too. So I guess it will just drive me crazy for the rest of my life, no big deal. Also, Esther is a bigger horror than the supposed "demons," the way she treats her kids. I found her depiction realistic to an almost uncomfortable degree. Father Bernard deserved better.

Recommend if you like atmospheric, slow burn horror. I had a great time, even though I hated every second at Moorings. I kept thinking about how if this had been a trip I'd taken with my parents, how fast we would have been out of there the second shenanigans started up.