One of the books I was most looking forward to from this year's Booker Prize Longlist was Stone Yard Devotional, and it ended up being a bit of a disappointment for me. I picked up Sinéad Gleason's Hagstone based almost entirely on the strength of the cover and the title, so I didn't have any expectations whatsoever going into it, but I was still surprised to find that it scratched the itch I was hoping for Stone Yard Devotional to scratch.

Hagstone flirts with folk horror in a really interesting way. All the elements are there - an insular almost-cult on a secluded island preparing for a seasonal pagan celebration (in this case, Samhain); a woman who makes strange concoctions out of plants and mosses, who some people call witch; an eerie sound that only some people on the island can hear, that causes strange effects like everyone with a uterus suddenly bleeding at the same time; an outsider, new to the island, who gets caught up in a weird folk ritual and is almost sacrificed to appease a folk god.

In a more traditional folk horror narrative we'd see this from the point of view of the sacrificial outsider - and we have, many times, in films like The Wicker Man and Apostle. Instead, Hagstone puts us in the shoes of the "witch", a woman who turns out to be a working artist struggling with the reality of having that sort of job on a remote island. Or of having that sort of job at all. The horror element takes a back seat to an exploration of what a life spent making art means, of the sacrifices and costs required, of the negotiations between making the art you want to make and making the work people are willing to pay for. It asks whether art made for art's sake has any inherent value, or if the value is in the impact on the audience; does are demand and audience? And is the cost of making it, the isolation and sacrifice, actually worth it?

I really enjoyed this. It's not a perfect book: there are issues with the pacing caused by occasional head-hopping between characters in chapters that are too short and infrequent to provide any meaningful new perspective but simultaneously so frequent that they break the flow of the book in a jarring way, but those issues are minor and more than made up for by wonderful writing that knows exactly what it's doing at all times. The island feels alive and real, like I could go there tomorrow. I was gripped from the first words ("Wave-fucked") and as the book drew to a close I found that I didn't want to leave the island. Definitely worth picking up.