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.