The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley

[susannahmoodie]

Just finished this. Anyone read it? One of the creepiest, most macabre books ever!

[mimbleandlittlemy]

It's our next book club book. Did you enjoy it even if it is creepy and macabre?

[susannahmoodie]

Oh yes I loved it. I love creepy and macabre! Interesting mix of themes- catholicism and disability. Amazing setting and sense of place. But horrific and disturbing details.

[mimbleandlittlemy]

Oooh, that'll cause some wibbling amongst our more sensitive souls then!

I'm just reading The Lie Tree then will start be starting it after that as I've got a couple of weeks before I need to have read it.

[5Foot5]

Just finished this. I did enjoy it and found it page-turning towards the end. However, I felt the ending left me a little flat. It wasn't quite as gruesome and nail-biting as I thought it might be.

[lorelei9]

This is on my list but I hadn't realised there was a religious element. Will I need to know a lot of stuff to understand it?

[mimbleandlittlemy]

OK - now finished it. Didn't find it in the least creepy and for the life of me couldn't understand what he wanted to say. I was hoping for something much darker and creepier and all I got was a story that didn't seem to know what it wanted to be.

Ah well. On to another.

[shins]

Mimble -same. Couldn't understand the hype at all and found it very dull and rambling. I grew up old-skool Catholic so didn't find that aspect of it exotic or creepy either. Ah well, my quest for a scary book continues!

[TripTrapTripTrapOverTheBridge]

I enjoyed The Loney but don't recall any horrific and disturbing details? It was weird and interesting but definitely not scary.

The ending left lots of questions

[Hygge]

I was disappointed by it, more so now time has passed than when I first finished it. I think it left a lot of unanswered questions that made reading it a bit pointless.

I thought there were a lot of leads that were never followed, a lot of directions it could have gone in but none were really followed up on.

It's like the author had a lot of possible endings in mind and couldn't chose between them, so he just left it.

It could have been so much better, the landscape was creepy and atmospheric but not really made the most of, the shrine could have offered an explanation but didn't, there could have been more to the hidden room but once we found out about it then nothing more was really discovered, the weird local custom play could have revealed some kind of weird horrible tradition that explained things, we could have learned more about the girl in the other house, for example was she the first girl or had there been lots before, or had she previously been taken there to have a baby before this one, there could have been more about that house and it's history and what happened in the cellar, and why did the boy/man narrating (can't remember his name) have to start following his brother about when he saw the house on the news years later? What did he think was going to happen, and how did he think he might prevent it?

I read another book recently that left me with a lot of unanswered questions, The Death House by Sarah Pinborough, and someone on here said that if you finish a book wondering this much about it, it's bad writing by the author even if the book was good. I've started to think they are right about that. It doesn't matter how well written it is, if you feel you've missed all this much from a book they really haven't done their job properly.

I can't see me ever wanting to re-read either of them and it's a shame because I had high hopes for them both. Instead I've filed them under "good idea but not followed through" and given them up as a bad job.

[ShatnersBassoon]

I didn't find it creepy either. I enjoyed it, but, like others, found the open ends puzzling or frustrating rather than intriguing. My imagination wasn't interested enough to fill the gaps.