By this point, Hurley was firmly established as a \u201cfolk-horror\u201d author, a label he was initially happy to accept. In late 2019, though, he told an interviewer that \u201cit does feel like Starve Acre is the end of that process. I want to branch out and try different things\u201d.<\/p>\n
So it is that in his first novel since, the supernatural has disappeared and he has also kept his promise in that interview to write about \u201curban spaces\u201d. Nonetheless, old-school Hurley fans needn\u2019t worry that he\u2019s suddenly embraced straightforward metropolitan realism \u2014 because Saltwash is still abidingly strange. For one thing, as urban spaces go, the fictional but duly remote Lancastrian town of Saltwash is distinctly otherworldly, the way faded holiday resorts are, especially in winter. <\/p>\n
Tom Shift, 75 \u2014 the latest soon-to-be-disconcerted Hurley outsider \u2014 arrives there on a rainy November Sunday to find \u201cits glory days well over. There\u2019d been a funfair once but all that remains of it now was a metal archway reading \u2018Happylands\u2019 in jocular multicoloured lettering and an acre of bramble bushes and nettles.\u201d About the only establishment not shuttered up is the one Tom\u2019s looking for \u2014 the would-be ornate Castle Hotel, \u201ca place that took itself very seriously\u201d, but that is equally stranded outside its time.<\/p>\n
![\"Illustration](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/\/1371dddd-764b-4fca-af7c-89d23baabf04.jpg\")
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NOT KNOWN, CLEAR WITH PICTURE DESK<\/p>\n
Tom\u2019s reasons for the visit are pretty strange too. He has terminal cancer and, as part of an NHS pen-pal scheme, has been corresponding with a fellow sufferer called Oliver, whose emails have intrigued him with their erudition and enigmatic references to a nomadic showbiz life. Now Oliver has suggested they meet in person and has chosen the Castle (whose Kafkaesque name might not be
coincidental) as the place to do it.<\/p>\n
But when Tom gets to the hotel, there\u2019s no sign of him \u2014 just a large group of elderly people dressed to the nines for some sort of annual dinner, culminating in a mysterious draw that they are all desperate to win. Eventually, Oliver does show up and it\u2019s clear that, as a longstanding member of the group, he\u2019s invited Tom to be part of it.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Nordic noir at its most original \u2014 plus the best crime fiction of 2025 so far<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n For much of the book, neither Tom nor we know why. Meanwhile, plenty of booze is drunk and as the small talk grows larger, it emerges that everybody present, Tom included, has done something terrible in their life for which they want absolution. There are hints (not least on the dust jacket) that this is where the draw might come in \u2014 but the evening proves far odder than that, in ways I\u2019d better not reveal. <\/p>\n Threaded through all of this are Tom\u2019s thoughts on the whole peculiar business of old age, illness, dying and death, and of ever having been alive in the first place \u2014 thoughts that provide some of the book\u2019s most memorable passages. In the abstract, the notion that life and death are themselves deeply strange may not sound like a startling insight. Yet, by marrying it so closely to the strangeness of everything else unfolding at the Castle, Hurley makes it feel crunchingly arresting.<\/p>\n