This is a read-in-one-sitting book – short, gripping, claustrophobic, it keeps you turning until the very end.
It’s the story of Juliette and Richard, a young couple who move to an old family home, Starve Acre, in a small village in the Yorkshire Dales. They raise their son Ewan there, but sadly he dies at the age of 5.
In many ways this is a study of grief, how it affects the two of them in different ways. Richard throws himself into excavating the barren field across the road from their house, trying to uncover an ancient oak tree that folk history says was there and used for hangings hundreds of years back – a use that has led, it is said, to the field being barren.
Juliette meanwhile is struggling to get over Ewan’s death, still sleeps in their son’s room, and is convinced she can feel his presence. She invites their friend Gordon and an older woman known for her connection to the supernatural, Mrs Forde, over for what seems to be a seance, where Juliette discovers something that suddenly gives her hope, but that Richard can’t understand.
The only other character in the story of significance is Harrie, Juliette’s sister, who arrives and stays at Starve Acre with the intention of bullying her sister into getting on with her life and overcoming her son’s death.
** Spoiler alerts coming ** We learn gradually that Ewan was a troubled child even at 4, sometimes excessively violent, once going missing in the night, and although it’s never fully explained there are hints it’s connected to the barren field opposite their house where he sometimes plays. In particular, it seems to have led him to being directed by an invisible friend or possibly supernatural being known in local folklore as Jack Grey.
And things begin to escalate when Richard finds the bones of a hare which he takes home. The hare mysteriously regenerates, becoming a living creature that keeps on coming back to the house, eventually being taken on by Juliette as a disturbing and thoroughly inappropriate replacement child.
It’s a great story, brilliantly written. It plays with the relationship between grief and fantasy, with Juliette seeming to grasp for supernatural explanations for the death of Ewan. But there’s more to it than that – the hare, the tree, the voices Ewan heard, perhaps even his death, all are weird occurrences that can’t be explained away by a psychological disorder. So we’re left wondering what’s going on here, grief yes, but something else, something inexplicable too. History, folklore, death coming back to haunt us.
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