Starve Acre eARC Review

GoodReads:

The worst thing possible has happened. Richard and Juliette Willoughby’s son, Ewan, has died suddenly at the age of five. Starve Acre, their house by the moors, was to be full of life, but is now a haunted place.

Juliette, convinced Ewan still lives there in some form, seeks the help of the Beacons, a seemingly benevolent group of occultists. Richard, to try and keep the boy out of his mind, has turned his attention to the field opposite the house, where he patiently digs the barren dirt in search of a legendary oak tree.

Starve Acre is a devastating new novel by the author of the prize-winning bestseller The Loney. It is a novel about the way in which grief splits the world in two and how, in searching for hope, we can so easily unearth horror.

Purchase Links

Amazon UK | Amazon US

**The links to the book used in this post are Affiliated links, should you click on my links and use them to purchase this book, it will gain me some monies, and will cost you nothing, but gotta disclose this first.**

My Review

What can I say? This book was creepy, dark, and mysterious. I loved it, and it did have an aspect of horror that though chilling was also okay for cowards like me to read, haha.

There was a really raw feel to the grief in this story, both husband and wife affected in different ways. Not to mention this whole while there’s darkness encroaching, what you think is just grief eventually twists. It’s amazing and I cannot express how delightfully creepy I found this book. It’s more of a novella really in terms of length but there was no denying the fact that this is one fully fleshed out story of grief, creepy hares, and the folklore of a village still alive in the mystery under the field.

It also felt a bit reminiscent of Cujo, in the way the child is experiencing things, the flashbacks in ‘Starve Acre’ help to draw on this horrifying dread.

This book was amazing. The prose was completely haunting and this story left you chilled to the bone from start to finish. It was brilliant how Hurley made you as the reader always sense this looming/impending doom. You weren’t sure what would happen, you weren’t sure what exactly happened before the start of this but you watch this creepy tale slowly unravel the past and come together with the future to give you something horrific and breathtaking.

Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for an eARC in exchange for my honest opinion. 4.5/5 Cups of Hot chocolate from me, sorry for the short review but basically: IT’S DARK, SCARY, AND AMAZING, GO READ IT.