Devil's Day by Andrew Michael Hurley

I really loved Andrew's previous book The Loney, so I was very much looking forward to reading this new one. I'm not really sure how I feel about it. Slightly disappointed, in that it doesn't have the same impact of being unnerved as with the first one. That's not to say that the writing is badly written - he writes impeccably well. It's just that for the first half of the book, I skimmed many pages and really, when I got to the end, the pages I'd skimmed could really have been cut out altogether. I wasn't drawn into the story as much as with The Loney, and only really enjoyed about the last half or even quarter. That's probably because that's where most of the action was - the rest was a large amount of descriptive text of surrounding landscapes, nature and historical characters, which I wasn't really interested in. There was also a lot of jumping around timewise, and sometimes I found myself reading a paragraph and not knowing if we were still in the past or back in the present.

John and his new wife Kat travel from Suffolk to John's dad's farm near Lancashire, where every year they go through a ritual of rounding up the sheep from the moors and bringing them down to the farm out of the harshness of the winter weather. They then put on a sumptuous feast and call the Devil in to fill his stomach with food and wine so that he'll go away, sleep and forget to take sheep or cattle. This is called Devil's Day. However, this particular year, things have happened within the village which have caused fear and tension amongst the neighbours, and John and Kat's first Devil's Day together will be one they will never forget.