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.