By the Prince of Demons 
 Well might Stephen King write an endorsement for the cover of this British debut novel; it shares his sense of horror creeping into ordinary lives and places. Andrew Michael Hurley does not quite have King's knack of gripping tight and not letting go; the novel's relative slowness is what keeps me from that fifth star. But he does have something that interested me a lot: the feeling that there is little to choose between the black magic and the white. The book is steeped in Roman Catholicism of a particularly demanding variety, requiring rituals, pilgrimages, retreats, and self-mortification. The air is thick with superstition and spiritual coercion long before the first signs of any external evil become apparent. 
 "The Loney" is apparently a stretch of the Lancashire coastline between the rivers Wyre and Lune. Google Earth it, and you will find a stretch of marshy land, little inhabited, with wide tidal flats stretching out to sea. Hurley has added to it, giving it a small hill or two, a Saxon church, a pilgrimage shrine, and an island named Coldbarrow a mile out to sea, reached only by causeway at low tide. He also imagines two cobwebbed old houses: Thessaly on Coldbarrow and Moorings on the mainland, that serve as the opposing poles of his story, although both seem equally haunted. It is to Moorings that the Smith family has always come for a Holy Week retreat with others in their London parish, led by their authoritarian but respected priest, Father Wilfred. But Father Wilfred has died in mysterious circumstances, and Mrs Smith virtually forces his successor, the young and open-minded Father Bernard, to repeat the tradition. 
 She has another reason. The Smiths have two sons. Andrew, the elder, known as Hanny, has been speechless since birth and is generally thought to be mentally retarded; she has constant hopes that the week-long ritual will cure him. Hanny is looked after by his younger brother, whom Father Bernard calls "Tonto," who was a young teen at the time of this last pilgrimage in the 1970s. He is the first-person narrator of the book, looking back from four decades later. We learn in his first chapter that Hanny has indeed been cured--but by what agency, and at what price? As an epigraph, Hurley quotes St. Matthew's account of Jesus healing a man who had been mute from birth, ending with the comment of the watching Pharisees: "It is by the prince of demons that he drives out demons." Is this the case here? 
 The atmosphere is oppressive from the very beginning. Moorings is the house of a former taxidermist, furnished with decaying examples of his work, and still bearing traces of a daughter who was quarantined there to die. The parishioners camp there with some discomfort, settling in for the usual atmosphere of "prayers in the sitting-room [and] various shades of gloom moving about the house like extra guests." The boy's mother, whom they always call Mummer, is way over the top in her devotion, monitoring strict adherence to the Lenten fast, and demanding that the new priest carry out the rituals of the Stations of the Cross, the Good Friday Masses, and the muddy Easter Monday trek to the overgrown shrine to perform a ceremony that seems more like exorcism than healing. There are sinister forces on the horizon, yes: some local inhabitants who seem to resent their visit. But their malign presence appears to be associated with welcome miracles; almost as great an evil, for me, was the perverted religiosity of Mummer Smith and the late Father Wilfred. Hurley has turned the traditional horror story on its head; whatever his slight problems with pacing, that is quite an achievement.