This one hit something out of the park for me and I’m honestly still trying to figure out what it was. It was one of those tense atmosphere books where you just feel frightened while reading it. Another fast read for me!

"There's a sense, isn't there, of being drawn into someone's orbit? Of being, against your will, actually, quietly vaporised. We all understand that. It's nothing new, but a darkness is always behind it."

Jemma and Rory meet in a bar one night and have a one-night stand, even though Rory already has a fiancée. Soon, they enter into a relationship and even though they've only been together for six months, they buy a depressing large fixer-upper together in the Midlands. They make friends with their new neighbours, but a tragic accident will shock the couple and draw them into making an awful decision.

'Lie of the Land' is described as a 'dark, domestic literary thriller'. I would add a touch of horror to that description. The first thing I'd critique about the book is that it is achingly slow. I know that literary fiction often is, but the motivating event only happens in the second half of the book, which, for me, made the first half a bit of a slog.

I'm not averse to literary thrillers: I love Tana French, for example, but while the language in 'Lie of the Land' is certainly poetic and lyrical, I found it tedious at times. There is a certain stylistic choice the author makes in the way she tells the story, which is sometimes brilliant and sometimes frustrating. You'll know what I mean if you read this book.

There is a pervasive sense of darkness and unease in the book, but the author doesn't seem to build on this, so the suspense doesn't increase as the plot develops, and sometimes I struggled to convince myself to pick the book back up.

I think this just wasn't my cup of tea.

I have been blogging here for more than ten years, and reviewing books online for longer than that, and in all that time I have, but very rarely, perhaps five or six times, come across a book so stunning, so good, that it's actually hard to know what to say about it (beyond "read this").

Lie of the Land is such a book.

Superficially, it's straightforward. Solicitor Jemma and accountant Rory have recently met and decide to move in to together. The house they choose - deliberately a "doer upper" - proves to be a nightmare, and being there leads to tragedy, guilt and despair.

But the story. Oh, the story. What depths of conflicted motivation are revealed here. What layers of deceit and misdirection.

It's told mainly in a slippery, indirect voice, almost as if narrated by a third party (but who?) which informs us what Jemma "will say":

'Jemma will say she watched Rory, she observed him in a way she hadn't since they'd first met...'

'But she'll say this now, she'll say she wasn't frightened, not then, not yet.'

Is this telling us what Jemma has actually said, on various occasions? As though the story is reporting an account she's previously given, one we may be partially familiar with, as though she's already notorious? Is it rehearsing a line that Jemma is planning to bring out, if questioned? (Why might she be questioned?) Or should we pay attention to the word 'say' as being distinct from what is actually true? Through this book, these questions arise again and again, the narrative voice layering doubt upon doubt, an effect only heightened as certain awkward facts emerge about Jemma, Rory, and Rory's previous girlfriend, Sophie.

From the moment that Jemma wakes in Rory's and Sophie's flat, the moment that, she 'will say', she discovered Sophie's existence, there is, I think, a doubt. We are ostensibly hearing the story exclusively from Jemma's perspective - though the narrator takes care to plant uncertainty, pointing out for example that Jemma is very motivated by money, that she wants out of the area. (So, is the narrator an investigator of some sort?) Whether that is supposed to suggest that her behaviour is more considered than the chapter of accidents presented in the book, or, perhaps, to be read in hindsight as a comment on what actually becomes of Jemma, is unclear.

What is clear - once the central catastrophe of this book falls, numbing both Jemma and Rory - is that the layers of motivation, the failures of empathy and the presence, frankly, of evil - coil round both of them, and round their neighbours Ed and Catherine (who occasion a bit of Abigail's Party-esque light relief at first, but later add more than a touch of darkness) like mist rising from the troubled Black Country earth.

At one level the book reads as though all Jemma's troubles arose from buying that house, as though the land was contaminated (not unlikely in that area) or contained old workings except it seems to be moral contamination, ethical or relationship workings, that lie beneath The Rocks. Hadley-Pryce uses all those tropes about an old, toxic house to underscore this point. Sure, we may think, given the various references to how things might have turned out if they hadn't bought the house, it must be something akin to a haunting that is in play here (even if it's a moral rather than a spectral painting?)

But - in another level of narrative altogether - maybe not. The chronology of the book also suggests that there has been a misstep even before the house was bought. Perhaps it is only responding to what's been brought into it? There is a whole business with Jemma and Sophie that we only hear about gradually but which precedes all else.

Either way, the playing out of mounting horror, the numbing of guilt, reflected in the bitter cold of that place, the feeble rumblings of the boiler that can never heat it, the noises off, all add to a sense of deepening crisis, one that's only made worse when a particular moment of unbelievable tension passes. Hadley-Pryce is adapt at playing on her readers' fears here, seeming to present one awful thing while actually the truth is something else as bad, or even worse.

It's not always an easy book. (Typing this just now I first wrote "it's not always an evil book" - and frankly I don't know what that says!) There are, as I said, moments of almost unbearable tension. There are times you want to look away. Though short, I had to read it slowly, taking time to think about what I'd read, and to read and reread certain parts, to mark and inwardly digest them. And it kind of haunted me after I had read it.

But, oh this book. What a captivating, sly, cutting experience reading it was. What multitudes it contains. What weirdness. What darkness.

Right from the beginning, there’s a clear sense that something isn’t quite right about the house - strange events like dead animals turning up in the garden, and unsettlingly intense neighbours, Ed and Catherine, living next door.

The story is told through an strange lens, an unnamed observer recounting Jemma’s experiences. While I thought this choice added an extra layer of unease to the atmosphere, it also kept me at arm’s length from the characters. As a result, they never really came alive for me and the core mysteries remained frustratingly out of reach.

I’m not a reader who expects every question answered, but by the end, I was left wondering what the author had intended. There’s a vague sense of a woman unraveling under the strain of a life she no longer wants, but nothing is clearly explored or explained.

The writing itself was solid, which saves it somewhat, but overall it left me feeling underwhelmed.

It was okay. I like the cover a lot. I'm just not sure the book had the same tone, and it threw me off.

Gemma Crawford is on a girls night out when she meets Rory. Rory already has a girlfriend but that doesn't stop them. The couple are soon buying a house together, a doer-upper. The story then goes on from there.

The story is set in The Black Country. Being from here myself I can easily visualise the places mentioned. Stourbridge (been many times), the cut (walked along), Russells Hall Hospital (been there don't want to go again), Barrow Hill ( haven't been but know it). I have to say the area is not as grim as it's made out but for drama purposes I will forgive the author.

The house does play a big part in the story. It has a very sinister feel to it and I couldn't make my mind up if it is supposed to be haunted or not. Again the house is just another grim element to the story.

The neighbours play apart also in the story and there is one particular part where I was quite lost with what was happening but I ended up just going with the flow. The writing style is a little unusual and not what I am used to but I managed ok.

Overall I liked the book in a quirky kind of way. It had an unsettling feel to it and gosh it was grim.

Thank you to the publisher via Netgalley for the book.

I have to be honest...I have absolutely no idea what I've read.

The story follows Rory and Jemma, who have a drunken one night stand, which leads to Rory's fiancee trying to take her own life. Rory and Jemma end up in a relationship. It's unclear whether this happens before or after the incident with his fiancee. They then buy a run-down house together to fix up. Mysterious events happen, but also don't happen. Nothing is explained. Everything is just left hanging or repeated in an endless cycle.

That is the extent of what I managed to pick out of the disjointed, meandering, sometimes paragraph long sentences. The writing style was so convoluted that I often found myself reading the same lines over several times trying to understand the point that was meant to be made, and by about 30-35% of the way through I gave up rereading sections because I realised there was no point to be understood, it was just unnecessary waffle. "She’ll say he didn’t even look back at her, he just dismissed that, like it wasn’t anything, and she’ll say, yes, she called his name, and she followed him down the hallway like she was chasing him but all she could do was watch as he put his coat on and struggled to open the front door." Sometimes whole pages have sentence after sentence like this, with no paragraphs, no line breaks, nothing to break up the wall of text. It got to the point where I was looking forward to the end of the book, purely so it was over. The complete lack of clearly defined chapters, just sudden random timeline changes, didn't help with comprehending what was going on.

Unfortunately, instead of the mysterious thriller I was expecting, this was just a string of ideas with little to no substance. I found the book boring and confusing with flat, unlikeable characters and geographical inconsistencies.

Did not really like this book… told in a different manner, and to me it seemed the lead was talked into too much by the guy she did t really like that much. The incident wasn’t clear, and the weirdness of the house was off putting . The general feel of the ending was weird.

Dark, cold, creepy haunting house thriller

Written in the illeistic, this is a creepy novel of a one night stand that turns into buying a creepier house at the edge of civilisation, and the seeming haunting and apparitions that the female lead, Jemma, sees but never quite believes.

Or is it? Her new boyfriend is not all that he seems, their bright shiny neighbours are clearly hiding something, and the bleak garden is a death trap that appears too claim a life before Jemma’s very eyes.

Or does it? I throw my hands up. I don’t really know. I’ve read some horror/thriller mashups this year, and some have been great, some have been terrible.

Two stars, for the atmosphere.

What I appreciate about Kerry Hadley-Price’s new novel, Lie of the Land, is that it is reminiscent of films like Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961) or Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others (2001), in that with the strategic additions of a dilapidated, old house and oddly disturbing children, one has the formula for a pretty successful and creepy Gothic thriller. Jemma and Rory, the protagonists, are a couple who decides to buy a home together in the Black Country, located in the Midlands, United Kingdom; a place that got its name “due to the smoke from many thousands of ironworking foundries and forges plus also the working of the shallow and 30ft thick coal seams” (from the BBC website). Readers immediately get the sense this was a reluctant purchase on Jemma’s part, but Rory seems blissfully oblivious to Jemma’s angst (the work is told from a detached Jemma’s standpoint, which adds more of a confessional and removed quality to the text).

The full review will be coming out later today, 1/21/2025 at https://greatbutunknownperformances.wordpress.com/.

ADVANCED REVIEW COPY

Kerry Hadley-Price is a new author to me, though this is her fourth novel published by Salt Publishing...I'm left wondering if they're all as dry as this offering.

The book has elements of Urban Horror, young couple buy a "do-er upper", house has a history of failures and an inexplicable malignancy, freaky neighbours with hidden issues...then a tragic event occurs which takes us on a head scratching
journey - but no spoilers...not my style

Most of what I wrote above you can get from the cover and the advertising blurb - or from reviews that serve to repeat such information...

What was a spoiler for me is the strange narrative style that I assume Ms Hadley-Price experiments with here...page after page of "Jemma will tell how..." or "Jemma will say..." or "She'll tell..." or "she'll say"...over time it
becomes galling and takes something from my enjoyment of the storytelling...there are long paragraphs placed throughout the book, whole pages where there are no indents , no line breaks...long consecutive sentences full of the "will tell/say..." nonsense...they
cried out to be skim read and most of the time I obliged as half way through the book I was begging for it to stop...

...and eventually it does stop and Vince will say what was that all about, where did it go, why did we go there...Vince will tell how he feels robbed of four days of his reading life that he can never get back...Vince will not be rereading
this book as it offered him nothing.

I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

Jemma and Rory are in a fairly new relationship when they buy a place that needs a lot of work. A creepy domestic thriller that once you get passed the writing style is gripping and well written. I enjoyed this book a lot. Thanks to Salt publishing and Netgalley for this review ARC.

This literary thriller by Kerry Hadley-Pryce from a small publishing house (Salt Publishing) is a curious one. Set in the Black Country in England (an area in the West Midlands), it’s creepy and atmospheric, with some good descriptive writing, but ultimately the story peters out and goes nowhere.

Rory and Jemma meet in drunken circumstances and seemingly against Jemma’s better judgment she becomes involved in a serious relationship with Rory and they buy a dilapidated house as a doer-upper. From the get go, it’s apparent that the house is strange, with dead animals appearing in the garden and oddly intense neighbours Ed and Catherine next door.

The book has a strange narrative style in the sense that the story is written from the retrospective perspective of someone observing Jemma. I didn’t mind this too much as it added to the sinister atmosphere, but ultimately the characters remained unknowable and the mysteries at the heart of the story unsolved.

I’m not the sort of reader who needs everything tied up in a neat bow but I’m not sure what the author was trying to do here. Nothing is ever explained and every loose thread is left hanging. Portray a woman having a nervous breakdown, buckling under the pressure of a relationship she doesn’t want to be in perhaps? A just ok 2.5 stars rounded up for some decent writing. 3/5⭐️

Many thanks to Salt Publishing for the arc via @netgalley. As always, an honest review.

Every now and again, a book captures my attention like a fish hook and I'm painfully pulled into the murky tale, unable to escape. Lie of the Land is one of these. A dark and unsettling story, a bit weird and eerily brilliant.

A young woman family lawyer meets a man with the intention of a brief affair - he is engaged after all. But this quickly becomes something else as they commit to buying an old dilapidated Victorian house with the intention of doing it up and selling it in order to make a profit. They make friends with their next-door neighbours who have two daughters.

The story opens with the main character describing the big oak tree that blocks out the light in the garden, and the birds she believes are nesting in it. These are things she refers to throughout: the oppressive tree and the house, the birds symbolic of freedom and the tenuous link between life and death. She finds herself strangely trapped like a bird caught in the attic. Although she is a successful professional she remains caught in a relationship she doesn't care for in a house she doesn't like.

The writing style is unusual but suits the tone of uncertainty and suggests, perhaps, the mindset of someone in the legal profession. From the lawyer's perspective in the third person, everything is expressed in a future tense, not always clearly and with a fair amount of ambiguity that leaves everything open. Excellent writing.

However, the real main character is the landscape. Set in the Black Country, an area undefined in the the English Midlands, there is a hint of crime and unsafe areas such as the canal. There is a gothic atmosphere highlighted by the tall buildings, cold weather and sunless rooms - even the girl next-door dresses as a 'Goth'. This is a story of stagnation and continuity, from the ancient oak and rituals of birds, to rocks and fossils. If someone wasn't of the Black Country to start with, they would change to become part of that land.

A clever, psychologically disturbing and an original book.

I really like the description for this book, but was disappointed in the book. The writing style was strange, full of ‘she will say’ which I found difficult. The actual story started ok but soon drifted with disjointed snippets that I couldn’t first into a timeline.
The book ends without any resolution to the few strands that I couldn’t first into pick out.
I want to give it 2.5 but have rounded up to 3.
Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC

You know right from the start that things aren't going to end well in this book. Jemma is a family lawyer who has just won a case in a slightly dodgy way, gaining custody for the father for no better reason than she has to win. That night, she meets Rory, a formless kind of guy with whom she slides into a relationship in spite of herself. The language is slippery, the narrator telling. us how Jemma would be laying out the case of what has happened, if she had the opportunity. The world of the characters is gloomy and claustrophobic, and there's a weighty inevitability to their journey. It's beautifully written, the tension maintained almost unbearably throughout. Not a fun read, but an effective one nonetheless.

Jemma isn't sure that she wants to be with Rory, let alone be buying a dilapidated ruin of a house deep in the Black Country with him. Reluctantly, she moves into The Rocks, but immediately feels something off about the house - and about their new neighbours.

It is important to remember when reading Kerry Hadley-Pryce's Lie of the Land that it is a literary thriller rather than a no-frills thriller. If you come to this book expecting breakneck twists and turns, red herrings, cliffhanger chapter endings (in fact, any chapters at all!) and a tidy resolution, then you will likely be disappointed. Lie of the Land is a novel which prioritises atmosphere and characterisation over plot, and, for me, it does so very successfully.

From the opening words of the book, Hadley-Pryce crafts an oppressive atmosphere which becomes more and more stifling as the tension builds and we delve deeper into Jemma's troubled psyche. The characters feel unlikeable and unsettling, even when they ostensibly attempting to be loving or friendly. Even Jemma, our protagonist, feels suspect thanks to a unique narrative voice which relays her story as if she were recalling it to a police officer: 'It was cold that day, Jemma would tell.'

I was a little disappointed that several important questions remained unanswered at the novel's conclusion, but then again, that wasn't really the author's point so it feels somewhat churlish to be frustrated. Perhaps the main question we should be asking is this: how much of what happens in the book really happened, and how much of it is in Jemma's mind? The descriptions of both characters and settings - most notably the house and the nearby canal - are so eerie and laden with portent that they alone kept me gripped; Hadley-Pryce takes Stephen King's concept of slippage and uses it to embue the area of the West Midlands known as the Black Country with a quiet menace.

Thank you to NetGalley and Salt Publishing for the opportunity to read and review an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I really didn’t like this book and unusually for me DNF and gave up at 55% even though this was a short book. The writing style is silly and pretentious yet drivels on without any plot or character development. The characters are unlikeable and I didn’t have any interest in the outcome which is why I DNF for the first time this year.

I thought the story idea was solid and loved the setting but the writing was a little odd. It almost trailed off at times. It was written it an odd style where sentences would be set up like "Jemma would say..." vs just writing what she would say or think. It was almost like reading a report of some kind at times. The book was really just vibes and I didn't feel like that worked well for this type of book where you do want some sort of details.

A depressing domestic thriller, Lie of the Land is narrated by Jemma who introduces her thoughts with “she’ll say.” And why? Is she arrested, on trial or are these the symptoms of a broken mind? It could be because Jemma’s life is overflowing with problems. On a whim, she has partnered with Rory who was and now is not engaged to Sophie. An accident involving Sophie which may or may not have been provoked by Jemma causes her to leave her job and help Rory with the run down house they have impulsively bought. What follows is either a descent into madness, a haunting, a murder or something else which we may never understand.

The unknown is the strength of Lie of the Land. Is it a mystery, a psychological thriller or a horror story? The location in England’s Black Country is both bleak and atmospheric. The characters confuse and change as Jemma describes them. I’m not sure what I just read but its pull was so strong that I cant stop thinking about it. 5 stars.

Thank you to NetGalley, Salt Publishing and Kerry Hadley-Pryce for this ARC.