The death of a child is an unthinkable thing: tragic, unnatural, and spiritually draining. Starve Acre goes one step further and examines the fallout of such a loss—the horror of having to live the days, weeks, and months after the fact. Starve Acre sets out to share what it’s like to live this continued existence with its readers, and it does an admirable job; just not without its flaws.

Starve Acre is the name of the house that archeologist Richard Willoughby inherits from his parents. Located in a small rural community in Northern England, it is a quaint and isolated place that his wife Juliette deems suitable for raising their family. They have some trouble integrating with local society at first, but the real descent begins after their young son, Ewan, dies.

The novel opens with the couple having drifted apart weeks after Ewan’s passing. Juliette is devastated and Richard tries to treat his own grief by plunging into several personal projects: an archaeological dig out in their yard, and an attempt to catalog the contents of what used to be his father’s library. Juliette, somehow convinced that Ewan is still present in the house, has been sleeping on a mattress in her son’s room while talking to a son who isn’t there. When she gets a chance to invite an occultist over to the house for a seance, she leaps at the opportunity right away.

For most of the book’s duration, Starve Acre is a slow burn. The story is told non-linearly, as the narrative often jumps back in time when an object or event prompts Richard to recall a memory of Ewan from some time in the past. Layers are slowly peeled apart, both in the flashbacks and the present, as Richard tries to manage his wife’s increasingly erratic behavior and his deep dive into the house’s ignoble history. The plot only finds its steam in the final few pages, when the final truths are uncovered right before the story ends.

This is the weakest aspect of Starve Acre. Most of the story seems like rising action, with creepy events upon creepy events upping the ante and deepening the mystery without much revelation until the point where the floodgates open. The ending isn’t much of an ending either—it’s more like a climax without any real resolution.

It can be argued though, that Starve Acre leaves much of the horror (especially the aftermath of what happens in its final pages) to the reader’s imagination. Perhaps that’s a suitable approach for a story with its roots deeply into folk horror and old gods. While the plot might have lacked some structure in the end, the characterization is very well done, and the quiet despair of Richard and Juliette is in many ways the true horror of the book—what depths of insanity are you willing to plumb in order to rationalize the loss of your son?

The plot is fine, but the ideas are fantastic: highly recommended.