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.
AVP: Alien Vs. Predator (2004): written by Dan O'Bannon, Ronald Shushett, and Paul W.S. Anderson; directed by Paul W.S. Anderson; starring Sanaa Lathan (Alexa), Raoul Bova (Sebastian), Lance Henriksen (Weyland), Ewen Bremer (Graeme Miller), and Colin Salmon (Stafford): I mean, it's a mild diversion with a few gross-out moments and a few decent action sequences. That makes it better than Alien: Covenant. And there isn't a cheap, ghoulish fate awaiting our heroine, a spunky Sanaa Lathan.
And Aliens do indeed fight Predators, just like the title promises!
Does legendary hack director Paul W.S. Anderson understand the Alien movies better than Alien and Alien: Covenant director Ridley Scott? Yeah, I guess he does, at least in the years since Alien came out in 1979.
The stuff about pyramids and Aztecs and Egyptians and Cambodians is hilariously dumb. Well, or at least historically challenged.
And pretty much every effective shot is an homage to a shot from either Alien or Aliens, leading to a somewhat attenuated sense of deja vu throughout.
But the Aliens here were definitely NOT created by cuckoo android Michael Fassbender of Ridley Scott-directed Prometheus and Covenant. No wonder Scott declared that this movie is not part of official Alien continuity. Lightly recommended.
Deep in the Darkness by Michael Laimo (2004): Solid and enjoyable horror-thriller walks in the footsteps of Arthur Machen and some H.P. Lovecraft (specifically "The Lurking Fear" in the latter case). A Manhattan doctor gets an offer he can't refuse: take over the rural New England practice of a recently deceased M.D. and get out of the city with his wife and 5-year-old daughter. What a deal!
Ha! The only place more dangerous than the city in a horror novel is the country (and paradoxically, vice versa). It might be more accurate to say that wherever you go, you should have stayed away.
Laimo chose to tell this story within a frame narrative that establishes that something really terrible has happened from the beginning of the novel. I"m not sure it's a great choice -- it primarily explains 'where' the first-person narration comes from without adding much in the way of suspense.
The antagonists of the novel straddle a line between 'natural' cryptid and supernatural boogeyman until very late in Deep in the Darkness. All is (sort of) revealed in a mostly satisfying manner. And Laimo has his sometimes muddle-headed protagonist of an M.D. realize that muddle-headedness, and ponder the source, as the novel progresses. People do some oddly stupid things in the course of the narrative, but there's actually an explanation for that, one that makes sense. And one that the narrator realizes, perhaps too late.
Laimo describes both the antagonists and their woodland haunts viscerally and grotesquely. The novel seems especially oriented to the smells of horror. It also gradually orients itself towards sexualized body horror as it progresses, leading to a couple of extremely graphic and disturbing scenes as the novel moves to a climax. And is a child in danger throughout the novel? Well, yeah. That never gets old.
Deep in the Darkness would probably work better if it were shorter. There's a dragginess to the middle section, a need to get on with it already given what we've seen so far. And while the first-person narration allows for both unreliability and a refreshing dose of unlikeability in the narrator, it also makes the late-novel objectification of the female body more problematic than third-person would. Characters other than the narrator never really achieve any depth, making what happens to them, especially the wife, verge on gruesome exploitation rather than carefully constructed body horror.
That there's a sequel to the novel makes a certain amount of sense -- Deep in the Darkness throws a twist in towards the end that allows for further expansion of the narrative while also recontextualizing everything we've read to that point. Though given that this is a first-person narrative recorded 'after' the fact, the revelation may unsuspend the disbelief of a certain portion of readers. Would a narrator lead with the revelation and explain things in terms of it? It certainly could be argued that this would be more believable, especially as the narrative is also framed as a warning to whoever finds it. Lightly recommended.
