Saltwash

The chilling new novel from the 'master of menace'

By: Andrew Michael Hurley

Narrated by: Phil Corbitt

'Wildly atmospheric and truly chilling' Liz Jensen, Guardian

'Andrew Michael Hurley's spookiest novel yet . . . crunchingly arresting' The Times

'Folk horror for our times' Financial Times

'Charged with dread' TLS

ALL WILL BE FORGIVEN, IF ALL CAN BE FORGOTTEN.

The dilapidated seaside town of Saltwash isn't a place that Tom Shift would have chosen to come to at all, let alone on such a bleak November afternoon. But his new friend, Oliver Keele, has insisted on meeting for dinner at the Castle Hotel, where the owners, the Paleys, try their best to cling on to the glory days.

Both terminally ill, Tom and Oliver have been bound by the saddest of circumstances, though they have found some solace in writing to one another via a pen-pal scheme set up by their respective cancer clinics. So far, their friendship has been conducted solely through letters, with Oliver proving himself to be a treasury of literary quips and quotes. Yet, for all his flamboyance and verbosity, he is guarded, and Tom suspects that he is lonely and nomadic. And Oliver sees Tom for what he is too: a man haunted by guilt and desperate to try and atone in some way before it's too late.

Regret is what brings others to the Castle. Much to Tom's surprise, dozens more guests appear, dressed in their finest to take part in a prize draw that offers one person the chance of deliverance from their remorse. But does everyone deserve the opportunity?©2025 Andrew Michael Hurley

Critic reviews

'Crunchingly arresting . . . While his previous books have used the supernatural to convey the uncanniness of the world, here he cuts out the middleman and delivers the uncanny unmediated by anything beyond the human. The unexpected result is his spookiest novel. It's also, I'd suggest, the best.'

Andrew Michael Hurley has built his reputation on novels where the landscape itself seems alive . . . Saltwash pushes this further still, conjuring a desolate seaside town on the Lancashire coast as both stage and character, a place where the human and the elemental collapse into one another . . . Hurley is expert at withholding, at allowing the world to tilt degree by degree until the floor gives way . . . To reveal the precise terms of the ritual would be to rob the reader of that pleasure . . . A vision of England at the end of it's tether . . . This is folk horror for our moment, where the terror is not that the old gods might return, but that they have been living and working darkly within us all along.

Wildy atmospheric . . . The driving animus of Hurley's fiction has always been place . . . he evokes the atmosphere and folklore of his settings with deft, idiosyncratic brushtrokes that bring the reader into territory as psychic, even mythic, as it is physical . . . The novel left me entertained, but also feeling raw, unsettled, existentially shaken. Welcoming on the outside, and increasingly unnerving as you reach the core of its gruesome, shocking proposition, Hurley's latest offering is Heart of Darkness wrapped in candy (Liz Jensen)

Hurley's books are rooted in the gnarly traditions of English folk horror. There's a touch of MR James about Saltwash, and Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected . . . Hurley uses nature and architecture to construct an atmosphere at once foreboding and banal . . . Saltwash blends themes of decay both personal and general with a ticking tension

Charged with dread . . . taking place over the course of a single night in this restaurant, its sense of real-time duration adding to the slow-burn suspense that has made Hurley's novels justly renowned . . . an agonising tension reminiscent of Shirley Jackson

Really creepy

Andrew Michael Hurley serves up another helping of seaside desolation in his latest novel . . . the garish aesthetics of the backdrop heighten the uncanny sense of estrangement, as does the oddly generic quality of the dialogue . . . evoking a sense of eerie hollowness befitting the broken-spirited creatures who populate this tale . . . It's grisly denoument sets up a melancholy meditation on free will, absolution and the fragility of life.