Starve Acre by Andrew Michael Hurley

This book is set in the Yorkshire Dales, with a young couple living in a bleak cottage by a field where nothing grows. They are both grieving for the death of their young son Ewan in different ways, Juliette is convinced that she can still feel his presence in the house while Richard buries himself in his academic work whilst searching the desolate field for ... something. He finds the roots of an ancient tree, digging up the bones of a hare in the process, and searching his late father's journals for clues as to the history of the area. At the same time, Juliette is persuaded by a family friend to engage the services of a psychic to make contact with her child. The narrative becomes fractured, with flashbacks to when Ewan was alive where we learn about his increasingly disturbed behaviour, seemingly caused by the strange voice that he says that he hears in the night time. The truth about Starve Acre is slowly uncovered with dreadful consequences.

No time period is specified for this book, but I imagined it as being set in the 1970s, and it's very much in the folk horror tradition of films like The Wicker Man and the bleak, claustrophobic feel of Hammer House of Horror. I could also imagine this working as a setting for a game like Vaesen with an investigation ongoing while events slowly start to escalate. It's a short book, but taut and effective. The conclusion requires some suspension of disbelief but it worked for me.