About The Loney, Stephen King wrote, “It’s not just good, it’s great. An amazing piece of fiction.”

The judges who awarded it the Costa First Novel Award wrote, “We all agreed this is as close to the perfect first novel you can get.”

I seriously wonder how it is possible we all read the same book.

It is touted as a thriller. I was never thrilled. It is supposed to be haunting and suspenseful. I found it to be neither. One reviewer suggested any reader would suffer sleepless nights.

Any sleeplessness this book caused in me related to my inability to figure out how it was so highly regarded.

The Loney

By Andrew Michael Hurley

The story is set in a gloomy coastal hamlet somewhere in the British Isles. The main character, his family, and a priest, return there to carry out an annual ritual aimed at curing his brother of his muteness.

While on their pilgrimage this time, the boys find a gun. They keep it. Some creepy locals appear. They are strange and do strange things. The boys meet an odd couple with a very pregnant teenage daughter. Some arguably supernatural – or maybe just unnatural - things occur. I couldn’t say for sure.

Perhaps the value of this book is in a subtlety too refined for my logical mind. But I read a lot of books and I feel that if I missed the point, so will many others.

Either way, The Loney’s purported genius was lost on me. My two thoughts when I finished the book were, first, what did I just read? Second, why did I just read it?

Published: 2016
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Elizabeth's rating: 1 star

“Ain’t no haints in Detroit” is a Turner family mantra that originated on the night Cha-Cha, the oldest of thirteen Turner children, wrestled a ghost in his room on Yarrow Street. While many of the other Turners were convinced of Cha-Cha’s vision, his father, Francis, was not, and coined the phrase. By the time the last Turner child, Lelah, was old enough for it’s usage, the saying was used to end a discussion. If another Turner didn’t buy whatever it was you were trying to sell, they’d stop you in your tracks with a flippant, “c’mon man, ain’t no haints in Detroit.”

The Turner House, by author Angela Flournoy, is about a large African American family and their goings on in Detroit. While most of the book is set in 2008, there are flashbacks to the Turner family beginnings in 1944 when Francis and Viola were newly married. With Cha-Cha on the way, Francis left Viola in Arkansas and went to Detroit to find work. These flashbacks let us know just how close the last twelve Turner children were to never being born.