The quintessential “bad place” is one of the staples of horror fiction. For Stephen King, the bad place – think the peculiar little town of Castle Rock or the Overlook Hotel in The Shining – most usually acts as a repository for a long-forgotten evil or injustice to resurface (often literally, like the dead cat from the desecrated Native American burial ground in Pet Sematary). For writers such as Robert Aickman, the nature of the bad place is more elusive, so deeply immured in time that its effects are felt more often than seen: a prickling at the back of the neck, a chilly intimation of doom that, when spoken aloud, is ignored or ridiculed by those who have so far managed to escape its spell.
So it is with Barrowbeck, a fictional village on the Lancashire-Yorkshire border that forms the centrepiece of Andrew Michael Hurley’s new collection of linked stories. We first approach Barrowbeck in midwinter. In First Footing, Celtic farmers have been driven from their homes on the Welsh border by Anglo-Saxon invaders. Desperately seeking shelter, they stumble into a narrow valley in a state of near-starvation. Their leader seeks counsel from the gods of earth, wind and water on whether he and his people will be allowed to stay. They are granted that permission, on the understanding that they will not own the land but be servants of it.
