Pyewacket (2017)

Pyewacket (2017): written and directed by Adam MacDonald; starring Nicole Munoz (Leah Reyes), Laurie Holden (Mrs. Reyes), Chloe Rose (Janice), and Eric Osborne (Aaron): Enjoyable horror movie filmed in Canada's new horror hotbed, demon-haunted Sault Ste. Marie pretending to be New England (see also The Void).

Once you get over the fact that mother and daughter (played by Laurie Holden and Nicole Munoz) look nothing alike, the movie works for the most part. The daughter is clearly meant to look more like her deceased father than her mother so as to be a constant reminder of the mother's dead husband -- there is dialogue to that effect. But this is a bit too much, so much too much that I half-expected the mother to yell "You're not my daughter!" at some point.

Nicole Munoz plays Leah as the most wholesome-looking Goth ever, as are her three high-school friends. They're all into a Providence horror writer who apparently puts working spells in his novels. Say what you will about Stephen King, but he never did that!

So in a fit of adolescent angst (or possibly sociopathic behaviour), Leah calls upon the demon Pyewacket to kill her mother. Then she regrets it and tries to send the demon back before it kills her mother. Oops.

Pyewacket is a 'real' demon name, by the way. I'd previously run across it in the Kim Novak witch-romantic comedy Bell, Book and Candle (1958), also starring Jimmy Stewart. There, Pyewacket is Novak's cat/familiar.

The acting from the principals (there aren't many principals) is solid throughout. And there are some genuine scares, not all of them jump-scares. The film-makers keep most of the horror off-screen, and there's very little overt violence. The movie seems to make it clear that the supernatural is 'really' happening, but it does leave some room for doubt in the old Turn of the Screw manner. How much doubt depends on whether a viewer believes certain shots to be objective camerawork or subjective visions by Munoz's character.

Not a great movie, but the second half makes up a lot for the slowness of the first half, with the last ten minutes really singing. The filmmakers seem to me to have a lot of promise. And Pyewacket barely clocks in at 90 minutes, so it doesn't wear out its welcome. Lightly recommended.

Hellboy in Hell: The Death Card

Hellboy in Hell Volume 2: The Death Card (Collected 2016): written and illustrated by Mike Mignola and Dave Stewart: A moody and magnificent and hopeful and dark conclusion to the saga of Hellboy. 

Is it the end? 

Well, BPRD continues, as things look dire on Earth. Down below, though, Hellboy, dead but alive, battles enemies in the Underworld in the wake of his execution of Satan in the previous volume.

Satan's death has sent Hell into turmoil. Hellboy still has miles to go before he sleeps, however. But as one character notes, you're dead, and yet your story continues. 

More background gets filled in, explaining Earth's ongoing peril over in BPRD even as hope is offered up against those forces of darkness that continue to gnaw at the world's vitals. Hellboy's role in the Apocalypse is also vital, though utterly unlike that which he was born and bred for before his premature arrival on Earth allowed Nurture to defeat Nature.

There is some two-fisted action here, but the overall tones bounces between the bleakly comic and the elegaic. Saying much more would give things away. Suffice to say that Hellboy meets his destiny, both like and utterly unlike what one might have guessed more than 20 years ago when this crusader against evil, born of evil, first appeared. The end cycles back to Hellboy's arrival on Earth, bringing things full circle while leaving a certain amount of mystery in place.

Mike Mignola, writing and on art, and with collaborators that include Duncan Fegredo and so many others, has crafted a moving, personal, hilarious, dark epic of fantasy and superheroics. It's a great achievement. Highly recommended, though not as a stand-alone volume.

The Revelation (1989) by Bentley Little

The Revelation (1989) by Bentley Little: "The horror poet laureate!" a blurb from Stephen King tells us on the cover of every Bentley Little. Was King joking? Because poetry is Little's self-admitted non-starter of a skill. 

Little even goes on at length in the introduction to one of his collections about his dislike of poetry. And when your novel contains a great line like "the putrid stench of violence" -- well, yeah, poetry is not a strong suit. Though a reference in The Revelation to "air-borne winds" cracked me up more.

Little's first novel was The Revelation. It won the Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel in 1989. The Stokers can be pretty hit-and-miss. Or 1989 could have been a bad year for first-time writers. Though if I looked at the Stoker list, I'm pretty sure I'd find worse novels. Oh, look, the first First Novel award went to Lisa Cantrell's The Manse. OK, The Revelation is better than The Manse.

That's not to say that The Revelation isn't entertaining. Little is part of a sub-group of horror writers of the late 1980's that includes Richard Laymon and Douglas Clegg who combined the graphic horror and sexual violence of splatterpunk with Stephen King's normative settings and characters. The result isn't something I find all that appealing, as it often seemed to involve an awful lot of rapey monsters with barbed penises strolling through suburban America.

Little works best when he's just in there, shovelling like a madman. That doesn't make him scary, but it can make the gross-out parts compelling, though often in a 'WTF?' sort of way. A key component of The Revelation seems to have been inspired by the 'Dead Baby' jokes of the late 1970's. I kid you not. 

The characters here are pretty flat. The protagonist is an aspiring writer working for a Pepsi distributor (if nothing else, The Revelation probably sets the record for most uses of the word 'Pepsi' in a horror novel not written by Pepsico). There's a good sheriff, a mysterious travelling preacher, a telepathic priest with doubtful faith, a lovely wife, a telepathic boy with visions, and a lot of rural types who are there to get chewed up and spit out.

Everything builds to a climax that really seems like an advertisement for a really insane Pro-Life group. Actually, the whole novel seems like an advertisement for a really insane Pro-Life group. Why? Well, let's just say that dead babies and aborted fetuses fill the ranks of Satan's army! And what better tool to fight an evil fetus with than... a pitchfork! Oh, what a novel. So terrible and crazy I will lightly recommend it.

Flatliners (1990)

Look out! There's a train coming!

Flatliners (1990): written by Peter Filardi; directed by Joel Schumacher; starring Kiefer Sutherland (Nelson), Julia Roberts (Rachel), Kevin Bacon (David), William Baldwin (Joe), and Oliver Platt (Steckle): I guess if you're going to kill yourself and then be revived so as to probe the mysteries of what lies beyond death, you might as well do so in a run-down, moodily lighted church while working at a hospital that looks like the offspring of a Renaissance art gallery, a brothel, and something Poe barfed up after doing too many shrooms.

You could use Flatliners to teach... the 1980's! Kiefer Sutherland, Julia Roberts, and Kevin Bacon BRING THE HAIR. So much hair. Such odd apartments. Kevin Bacon seems to live in an abandoned warehouse. William Baldwin seems to live inside a clock tower. Kiefer Sutherland seems to live in a set of rooms just vacated by Dave Bowman in 2001: A Space Odyssey prior to his transformation into the Star Child.

Joel Schumacher cues you as to supernatural shenanigans with colourful lighting. And what supernatural shenanigans! I enjoyed watching Kiefer Sutherland repeatedly pummelled by the ghost of a ten-year-old boy. Or is it a ghost? Time will tell!

Kiefer Sutherland has this outfit when we first see him... I won't spoil it. But it should go in the Smithsonian as an awesome example of late-80's chic. And Kevin Bacon rappels down from his apartment window at one point because this is what people did back then. Such, such were the joys! Recommended because it was terrible but fun.

Last Days (2012) by Adam Nevill

Last Days (2012) by Adam Nevill: Impoverished English 'guerilla' documentarian Kyle Freeman makes critically regarded documentaries with the help of Dan, his cameraman, and Finger Mouse, his film editor. But when the wealthy producer of a line of successful, New Agey books and movies offers a $100,000 advance to make a film about an odd, early 1970's Doomsday Cult known as The Temple of the Last Days, Kyle jumps at the chance to get out of debt.

The only problem from a creative standpoint for Kyle is that the entire shooting schedule has already been set, the interviewees paid to appear. But he can work around that.

The supernatural stuff may be a bit harder to deal with.

Last Days is probably Nevill's most purely enjoyable horror novel. There's a lot less focus on physical suffering here than in Nevill's other long-form works. Oh, there's suffering. But much of it is psychological. And a lot of Kyle's psychological suffering comes from the tension between his mounting terror at the supernatural events swirling around him and his occasionally selfish, stubborn drive to make the film, gets the shots, tell the story.

The details of Kyle's film-making have been well-researched and deployed -- Last Days is almost a guide to making documentaries on a budget. Kyle, for his faults, is an engaging protagonist. And as the details of the Temple of the Last Days emerge, the reader becomes more and more unnerved.

The Temple resembles a number of 1960's and 1970's cults, quite intentionally -- as per usual, Nevill details his research in his Acknowledgements section. Even a glancing familiarity with the subject yields up Charles Manson and Jim Jones as influences; so, too, Est and Scientology. 

The leader of this cult, Sister Katherine, led her followers on a six-year odyssey from London to rural France to Los Angeles to Arizona. In Arizona, the Temple seemingly met its end in some sort of murder-suicide outburst that left Sister Katherine dead as well. But now, 40 years later, the remaining members of the Temple are dying under mysterious circumstances even as Kyle and Dan pursue the story.

Nevill maintains a rapid pace throughout, globe-trotting to a wide variety of places no one would want to visit. The supernatural elements build. The excitement of Kyle at having possibly filmed a ghost (or something) at their first location soon gives way to fear as the supernatural incidents and the traces they leave behind become more and more disturbing and potentially dangerous.

Things get a little bonkers at the climax, but Nevill mostly sticks a landing that's both horrific and bleakly humourous. Kyle's trip to Amsterdam to learn the origin of the evils of the Temple is a high point of the latter stages of the novel, a detailed revelation of something that doesn't eliminate the mystery of where that something, that SOMETHING, came from. There's also a clever bit of universe-building related to Nevill's previous novels that occurs early in the novel; I'll leave you to figure it out. Highly recommended.

No One Gets Out Alive (2014) by Adam Nevill

No One Gets Out Alive (2014) by Adam Nevill: 19-year-old Stephanie has been kicked out of her house by her stepmother after the death of Stephanie's father. She did well on her 'A' levels but can't afford university. So, in a terrible English economy, she works temp jobs, feeling more and more overwhelmed. 

A sign in a convenience store for a cheap apartment at least offers some economic relief, though the apartment is in the run-down Perry Bar portion of Birmingham. The landlord, who calls himself 'Knacker,' is a bit creepy but friendly. So she moves in.

Things go rapidly downhill from there. Very rapidly. The bulk of the novel takes place over ten consecutive days, exhaustively described.

No One Gets Out Alive is easy to spoil, so I won't go into much detail about what happens except to note that Nevill merges supernatural and 'normal' horror effectively in an escalatingly awful series of events. Stephanie is an engaging protagonist whose growth over the course of the novel is believable and often heart-breaking.

This time around, Nevill goes after the media as a sort of sub-plot which also rings true. The dismal house is a character in itself, described in detail so as to maximize its miserable, disintegrating qualities. Claustrophobia is a major player here, along with the narrative's emphasis on bad smells, really bad smells, and really really really bad smells as augurs and indicators of Evil, like the fruits of the Devil or at least the mephitic products of the Devil's bottom.

Knacker and co-landlord Fergal are closely observed creations, terrifying and banal, especially Knacker. One does wish, perhaps, that Nevill didn't so closely link physical appearance to morality: Fergal never seems entirely real, and gets less 'real' as the narrative builds. Sometimes too much is too much. 

Nonetheless, Nevill's description of Stephanie's suffering, and her reactions to that suffering, never cross the line into exploitation. Though it does feel at points as if the reader is being crushed by events, wrung out. One admires the skill, but one does not necessarily want to read about a character who suffers this much for this many pages for awhile after completing No One Gets Out Alive. Like maybe a year or two. Highly recommended.

Thin Air (2016) by Michelle Paver

Thin Air (2016) by Michelle Paver: It's 1935. Upper-class British twits throng the unconquerable places of the globe seeking to conquer them. The poles have been penetrated. Only a handful of mountains remain upon which to plant the Union Jack. All a group of British mountain-climbers need to reach the summit of the third-highest mountain in the world, Kangchenjunga in the Himalayas, is fortitude and a small army of Sherpas and other native supply-carriers.

To Kangchenjunga come Stephen and 'Kits' Pearce and several others. The Pearces are semi-estranged upper-class brothers, older 'Kits' the adventurer and Stephen the doctor the expedition now requires, its previous doctor having fallen ill. Stephen wants to prove himself. 'Kits' just wants to emulate the heroes he spent his boyhood reading about. When it comes to Kangchenjunga, that hero was Edmund Lyell.

Lyell led an ill-fated, high-casualty expedition up Kangchenjunga in 1906. Then he grew rich and famous on his account of that expedition and the fame and adulation it brought to him. Lyell is now dead. On their way to Kangchenjunga, the Brits visit Charles Tennant, the last survivor. He lives close enough to Kangchenjunga to see it out his study window in the distance. But when Stephen questions him as to what really happened on that disastrous, lucrative foray into old and darkness, Tennant throws him out. Old nerves?

Well, we'll find out.

Michelle Paver does a marvelous job evoking so many things in this novel, from the privation of high-altitude mountain climbing to the petty bickerings of sibling animosity to the casual racism and classism of the typical upper-class Brit in 1935. It's made even more marvelous by her attention to brevity. Thin Air is almost a novella in length; all one wants at the end is more, even as one admires the skill required to tell a ghost story in short, sure strokes.

Or is it a ghost story? As in many ghost stories, Thin Air suggests human frailty and guilt as possible explanations for the seemingly supernatural at certain points of the narrative. That doesn't mean either/or -- the ghosts inside and the ghosts outside jostle for primacy in many of the greatest tales of the supernatural. Paver has written something at novel length here that can stand beside great ghost stories by Shirley Jackson, M.R. James, and Robert Aickman, all with a piquant taste of post-colonial cultural criticism. Highly recommended.

Hidden (2015)

Hidden (2015): written and directed by The Duffer Brothers; starring Alexander Skarsgard (Ray), Andrea Riseborough (Claire), and Emily Alyn Lind (Zoe): Parents Ray and Claire and tennish daughter Zoe hide in an old bomb shelter. They've been there for 300 days and counting. Creatures they've dubbed "Breathers" hunt for them on the surface. Underground, the food is running out.

It's a simple set-up for a fairly straightforward film. The performances by all three actors are solid and low-key, as is the direction. Flashbacks fill us in on what brought the family to the shelter. 

Running barely 80 minutes, Hidden is an adequate survival thriller which may or may not have a few twists along the way. Though the biggest enemies for much of the movie are a stubborn water pump and a rat that's gotten into the food supply. A talking doll carried around by Zoe plays the role of Chekov's Gun. Lightly recommended.

Under a Watchful Eye (2016) by Adam Nevill

Under a Watchful Eye (2016) by Adam Nevill: Best-selling horror writer Seb Logan has writer's block. Thankfully, a friend and mentor from his days in college returns to give him inspiration.

Ha!

Ewan is that friend -- unbathed, unkempt, drunk, and intrusive. Supernaturally intrusive. Ewan appears to have tapped into some underlying supernatural reality, one that he's pulled Seb into because Ewan wants a publishing deal. And someone to make his strange, scrawled manifesto publishable.

It's sort of the nightmare version of all those stories writers tell about people coming up to them at parties and saying, "I've got an idea for a story. You write it and we'll split the profits 50-50!"

Sen and Ewan's unpleasant reunion is only the beginning of Seb's forced plunge into a supernatural underworld of increasing malevolence. However, Ewan isn't the Prime Mover in these experiences. Who is, and why, starts to become apparent about a third of the way into the novel.

Under a Watchful Eye gradually builds one of the more unusual occult conspiracies I can think of in a horror novel or movie. The comedy may be bleak and black, but it's undeniably there, as Seb becomes aware. Once upon a time, a con-man and occasional horror writer created a psychic cult. The cult seems to have become defunct with the author's death in the early 1980's. But as Lovecraft might say, "That is not dead that can eternal lie..."

Nevill's recurring interest in portraying human suffering is a little muted here -- Seb's privation is more of a slow drip than a case of being repeatedly beaten about the head by a giant monster. It's still there, though. Stretches in the supernatural world are imaginatively constructed. So too many of the creatures lurking there, especially an awful, formerly human thing dubbed Thin Ned.

Nevill trades here in something close to the visionary horrors of Arthur Machen (referenced in the novel) and some of Algernon Blackwood's more rarified stories. There are horrifying sights and sounds in that underworld, have no doubt. But the overall arc is of a psychic, visionary quest that Seb is forced into by his human tormentors. His salvation, if salvation does indeed come, lies in understanding the rules of the supernatural better than his enemies understand them. And they've got a 30-year head-start.

Seb's chances for survival, though, rest on the novel's deflation of the trope of the all-powerful conspiracy, occult or otherwise. This is the chief delight of the novel's final third. What if that conspiracy was maybe, I don't know, run by idiots? Highly recommended.

A Quiet Place (2018)

A Quiet Place (2018): written by Bryan Woods, Scott Beck, and John Krasinski; directed by John Krasinski; starring Emily Blunt (Evelyn Abbott), John Krasinski (Lee Abbott), Millicent Simmonds (Regan Abbott), Noah Jupe (Marcus Abbott) and Cade Woodward (Beau Abbott): 

Best known as Jim from The Office (USA), John Krasinski does fine work here as co-writer, director, and co-star of A Quiet Place, a quiet piece of science-fiction horror that was almost a Cloverfield movie.

The movie isn't as quiet as the hype suggested. Or maybe I'm just more accustomed to quiet movies than most audiences and critics. It is pretty quiet, though. As the trailers and posters tell you before you enter the theatre, A Quiet Place follows the efforts of a family to survive an alien invasion by creatures who hunt by sound.

In case you're wondering, that's both active and passive sound. Passive-only and the aliens would spend a lot of time running into things as a tribute to the T. Rex of Jurassic Park and its inability to see things that aren't moving. Ha ha! But no, the aliens also possess some sort of active sonar.

Krasinski and real-life spouse Emily Blunt are excellent as the parents of three children, one of them -- the oldest daughter -- deaf. Do you think that deafness will become a plot point, perhaps even a major one?

Krasinski wisely keeps the monsters mostly off-stage and barely glimpsed until the climax. They're interesting creatures design-wise, and that design plays into the finale. The film also does a solid job of presenting pertinent information without relying on conventional exposition. A lot of information about the alien invasion appears in newspaper headlines pinned to the wall of Krasinski's character's workshop. So, too, possible foreshadowing of things to come.

For the most part, A Quiet Place is about desperate people who nonetheless remain competent in the worst situations. In this sense, it's a throwback to 1950's horror-science-fiction movies, except that instead of following experts trying to combat giant ants or flying saucers, we're on the ground with a single family. It's surprising how refreshing competent characters can be. It's almost subversive!

Perhaps there are a few things that don't quite ring true. But overall, this is a lovely piece of work, tense and tart and occasionally sweet, with characters one comes rapidly to care about. I do sort of dread the fact that a sequel has been ordered, however. Unless it involves alien invaders who hunt by the sense of smell. And is presented in Smellorama! Highly recommended.

Banquet For the Damned (2004) by Adam Nevill

Banquet For the Damned (2004) by Adam Nevill: Hard-rocking Birmingham, England 20-somethings Dante and Tom move to St. Andrew's, Scotland, to make their second album. They're all that remains of their band Sister Morphine, the other members having given up because of poverty and personal issues. 

They're in St. Andrew's at the invitation of visionary academic Eliot Coldwell. Coldwell's Banquet For the Damned  was a controversial 1950's book about Coldwell's quest for meaning through drugs and arcane rituals. It's also Dante's favourite book.

Needless to say, perhaps, but hero worship is about to take a beating.

Banquet For the Damned is Adam Nevill's first published novel. It's a humdinger. Eliot Coldwell is not the Kerouac-meets-Huxley hero of his own Banquet For the Damned. Instead, he's an alcoholic wreck when Dante first meets him. An academic laughing-stock for decades, in St. Andrew's only because two of its top officials went to Oxford with Coldwell and wanted to do a favour to an old friend.

Or should that be 'old fiend'?

There are strange goings-on at St. Andrew's -- the town, the university, and the golf course. Students are disappearing. And they're disappearing just before they finish their senior theses! OK, that last bit is not a major plot point.

Dante soon finds that he's being stalked by Something Strange. It's all tied to Coldwell and his odd student inamorata Beth. Beth is intoxicatingly sexy to Dante but also, he soon realizes, odd and dangerous. Something really strange seems to follow her around.

Into this mix, Nevill also adds American anthropologist Hart Miller. Miller has been researching outbreaks of Night Terrors in various places around the globe -- Africa, South America, and Newfoundland among them. An outbreak seems to have started in St. Andrew's. Will the short, hirsute, alcoholic anthropologist end up fighting evil rather than documenting it? And will his catchphrase -- "Hey now!" -- suggest that Nevill binge-watched The Larry Sanders Show at some point before writing this novel?

The politics of academia ring pretty much true throughout Banquet For the Damned. So, too, Dante's infatuation with Coldwell and his popularized 'Do what thou wilt is the whole of the law' philosophy. Neville handles the supernatural ably in this first novel, presenting something scary and interesting. 

The climax does seem very consciously aimed at a visual-effects-heavy movie, but nonetheless it flows nicely. And the characters who find themselves in a last stand against Evil act pretty pragmatically when the moment comes. They may not be fully prepared, but they're at least prepared. Competence goes a long way in horror novels. Recommended.

The Dark Tower (2017) [Redux]

The Dark Tower (2017): adapted by Akiva Goldsman, Jeff Pinkner, Anders Thomas Jensen, and Nikolaj Arcel from the series by Stephen King; directed by Nikolaj Arcel; starring Idris Elba (Roland), Tom Taylor (Jake), and Matthew McConaughey (Walter): On second viewing, The Dark Tower still works better for me than its audience or critical reception. Idris Elba is great, Tom Taylor is great, and Matthew McConaughey is OK, though direly in need of a sandwich or three. It's also one of the few movies I saw last year in a theatre that I wanted to be longer. Recommended.

See also

The Quatermass XPeriment: The Creeping Unknown (1955)

The giant teddy bear is not in the movie.

The Quatermass XPeriment: The Creeping Unknown (1955): adapted by Richard Landau and Val Guest from the BBC miniseries by Nigel Kneale; directed by Val Guest; starring Brian Donlevy (professor Bernard Quatermass), Jack Warner (DCI Lomax), Margia Dean (Mrs. Carroon), David King-Wood (Dr. Briscoe), and Richard Wordsworth (Astronaut Victor Carroon): 

Moody, atmospheric Hammer Studios science-fiction/horror adapted from the hugely popular Nigel Kneale BBC miniseries. The studio wanted an American to play Professor Quatermass, so the brusque Brian Donlevy plays the Professor as a brusque, semi-sociopathic scientist. He's pretty good, though I prefer Scottish Andrew Keir's more thoughtful Quatermass of Five Million Years to Earth, a dozen years later from Hammer.

Quatermass and his British Rocket Team (The Ministry of Space?) send three British astronauts into space, apparently without securing any government approval. The ship comes back. But only one astronaut is on board, and he's almost catatonic. Oops.

What follows is escalating horror, for the most part deftly done within the censorship and visual effects limitations of 1955. Nonetheless, The Quatermass Xperiment got an 'X' rating from the British censors for being too scary for children; Hammer simply altered the title to capitalize on this fact. In the US, the movie would be called The Creeping Unknown, another good title.

The actors have that committed, mostly low-key quality peculiar to the British. Even what appears to be a comical moment with a thickly accented pseudo-Cockney turns suddenly to dread and horror. Donlevy is good as Quatermass, who has to save humanity from the peril he himself has put it in.

Val Guest really achieves multiple creepy moments by emphasizing the aftermath of a monster's rampages, especially in the ruins of a London zoo. It's a worthy piece of horror, with Quatermass' final words supplying an augmentation of that horror which further Kneale serials and Hammer adaptations wouldn't follow: Quatermass would be humanity's defender after this, a sort of human, proto-Doctor-Who figure. Highly recommended.

Apartment 16 (2010) by Adam Nevill

Apartment 16 (2010) by Adam Nevill: The least successful of Adam Nevill's horror novels that I've read (5 and counting, True Believers!). There are good things here, especially the characterization of co-protagonist Seth. But they're overwhelmed by the bad and the inconclusive.

Seth is a struggling artist who works as the Night Porter at an old and exclusive London condo. Very old, very exclusive. London, England. Initially terrified by strange night-time noises issuing from the titular apartment, Seth's days and nights have soon been infected by nightmares and visions. On the bright side, all this really jump-starts Seth's moribund career as a painter. On the dark side, his paintings now look an awful lot like the art of the long-missing artist who lived in Apartment 16.

Uh, oh.

Apryl Beckford is our other protagonist, a chipper American twenty-something who has come to the condo to settle up her late great-aunt's estate. That great aunt hadn't communicated with the American side of the family for decades. Apryl is about to find out why.

Essen, the missing artist who vanished in the late 1940's  about 60 years before the events of the novel, was an occult screwball with fascist tendencies. He also may have tapped into some sort of horrifying spiritual reality. That's certainly what Seth believes. And events will gradually convince Apryl, too. Moreover, Essen doesn't entirely appear to be missing any more. And why did one of the residents permanently secure Apartment 16, paying for it to remain forever empty?

As co-protagonist, Apryl seems frustratingly dense at times, especially when it comes to mounting danger. The novel is certainly playing with readerly expectations here, but in doing so, it instead plays into stereotypical 'women in peril' tropes. Really, really stereotypical, especially in a climax which is not all that climactic, and in which Apryl brings only a disposable lighter as a weapon to the Apocalypse. Hey, ho! 

Nevill's male protagonists in other novels that include The Ritual, Banquet For the Damned, and Under a Watchful Eye learn enough during their descents into darkness to make a fair showing against dire opponents in the climaxes of their novels. Apryl does not. It's certainly not intentionally sexist, but when compared to Nevill's sympathetic male protagonists (of which Seth is ultimately NOT one), she seems like an unfortunate return to the Screaming, Incompetent Girl.

A visit to a meeting of Essen's cultish fans by Apryl doesn't work so well either. They are stereotypes of fanboys and fangirls: they're smelly, have bad breath, and are pathetically excited by Apryl's fresh loveliness. It seems almost like parody, but of what, exactly? A bad day Nevill had at a horror convention? 

That scene throws one right out of the horrors of the novel, as does Apryl's fascination with a sexy (slightly) older male academic and art historian whose sexy sexiness derails every scene he's in, even when he's warning Apryl that she's not a dashing girl detective in a story. Thanks, sexy academic!

Seth is marvelously developed, though he too suffers at the end, suggesting as much Plot Device as Pity. Really, everyone does, because Apartment 16 ends up seeming like the first half of a much longer novel. No such novel has so far appeared. Until it does, I'd suggest avoiding Apartment 16. Not recommended.

Mrs. God (1990) by Peter Straub

Mrs. God (1990) by Peter Straub: If you've ever been immersed in the attenuated horror show that academia in the humanities can be, Mrs. God is your horror novel. Peter Straub probably drew on some of his own experiences as a graduate student in the 1970's. Even if not, the novel still makes terrific, witty horror out of a struggling academic's quest to finish his thesis.

All But Dissertation (ABD) Ph.D. candidate William Standish is hard at work on a thesis about an obscure female American poet who also happened to be his grandfather's first wife. He's also languishing at a small Ohio college, under pressure to finish, his wife in her third trimester, personal and marital problems still fresh in his mind.

Then he gets the call from Esswood House, an English estate where once literary giants that included Henry James, T.S. Eliot, and Ford Madox Ford frolicked and fornicated and left rare manuscripts as thanks for the festivities to the Estate's library and Esswood's owners, the Seneschal family. Standish will have three weeks on a Fellowship at Esswood to go through his (sort of) grandmother's papers. It could be the academic break he's been pining for.

Well, it is and it isn't.

Mrs. God is a brilliant piece of academic horror. One wonders what horrors Straub himself faced during his years of graduate studies. The petty politics of Standish's life at small colleges in the United States ring true, providing a suitable backdrop to the increasingly weird and outlandish horrors and secrets of Esswood.

We also get a great scene in which Standish discovers what a Plowman's Lunch is, and is quite disappointed. Kippers also prove to be a small horror for the American. At least Esswood's wine cellar and whisky selection are both top-notch.

Straub is certainly nodding here to Robert Aickman's strange stories, ably, while mining his own territory of ancient evil, wryly served. Highly recommended.