I wanted to love this book a lot more than I did. Hurley is a great writer and I love the weird town set up normally (witness Malerman's Goblin, CL Grant's many forays to Oxrun Station, King's Derry/Castle Rock etc)
Unfortunately this is a very mixed bag. Some of the stories are brilliant, but others are merely quite good and feel unfinished.
There are a variety of writing styles on offer, matching the shifting timeframes. We start with a strong folk horror aspect to the founding of the town, things living in the ground granting permission for the settlers on the run from Viking raids.
We move through the middle ages and witchcraft trials before hitting the 20th century and finish off in the near future with environmental catastrophe.
My favourite in the collection is Natural Remedies set in 1938 where a childless couple is offered assistance of a supernatural nature. This was shocking and quietly heartbreaking in only a dozen or so pages. The Strangest Case- telling about a murder trial in 1792 was another highlight.
The biggest problem with the stories being themed around the town is that there seemed very few links between the tales other than the town. Given the dramatic nature of the founding of the town, it would have been reasonable to expect those powers at work to be referenced again but they didn't seem to be. s the stories were set closer together in time in the latter half of the book, there was an occasional namecheck, or a mention of driving past a location from an earlier story, but that was pretty much the limit of it.
Overall I really enjoyed it. there isn't a bad story in the book, but the standouts are good enough to make the others pale a bit too much in comparison. With several of the stories I was hooked throughout, with great character build up, great momentum and then they just kind of stopped rather than ended. I can't fault his style of writing, just his endings don't always land for me in these stories. When they do, they really work brilliantly.
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