The Reddening (2019) by Adam L.G. Nevill: Gripping, grueling, visionary work of cosmic folk horror from the author of The Ritual and Last Days. Archaeological discoveries in modern-day Devon draw a grieving sister and a depressed Lifestyle reporter into an ancient mystery and an ancient horror.
Mysterious underground sounds, a long line of disappearances and unexpected suicides, and the run-down farm of a minor rock-folk star of the 1960's figure in the narrative. So, too, people high and low lacking all empathy.
The mysteries of the ancient cult and its supernatural progenitors are vividly imagined and described, as are the psychologies of protagonists and antagonists alike. While not for the squeamish, the violence is modulated and necessary to the depiction of the cult and to the larger questions about humanity's love for ultra-violence.
Nevill weaves social commentary into the horrible imaginings, with the worst instincts of humanity being linked to Brexit and austerity measures and the overall rise of xenophobia and fascism throughout the world. It's the sort of novel that justifies my recent blurby observation that Nevill's two clearest forerunners in British horror are James Herbert and Ramsey Campbell. Highly recommended.
House of Small Shadows (2013) by Adam Nevill: Adam Nevill explores the shadowlands between mental illness and the supernatural in disturbingly effective ways in this horror novel that also involves a whole lot of taxidermy and a battalion of creepy dolls and marionettes and puppets and old people.
Catherine is a 38-year-old antiques appraiser with a history of mental problems dating back to childhood when she was abandoned at birth, adopted, and then narrowly avoided being abducted. Or perhaps "spirited away" would be more accurate. After a violent meltdown in London, she's found some peace working for an eccentric antiques dealer and reconnecting with a long-lost boyfriend.
Alas, things will begin to go horribly wrong on the day her boss sends her to a preliminary meeting with ancient Edith, who owns The Red House, near Hereford. Nothing sinister in that name, is there?
The Red House contains the life's work of post-WWI taxidermist and puppet-maker M.H. Mason: massive, exquisitely detailed tableaux of animals recreating WWI battlefields, strange dolls, and child-sized puppets of unusual design. None of it has ever been sold. If sold, the collection could bring in millions, though Catherine believes that perhaps the material should go to museums instead.
However, once Catherine enters the world of the Red House, Edith, and her laconic housekeeper Maude, events start to get a little odd. And progress towards greater oddity and horror.
Catherine believes her mental state to be precarious, fragile, easily disturbed. As strange things begin to happen, and as the fugue states of her childhood and early teenage years suddenly return, she believes that the cause is interior to herself. To survive the mental barrage, she believes she must acknowledge that her problems are the problems of a diseased mind and cling thus to reality.
Of course, if these things are not the products of a diseased mind... well, that could be a problem for someone who fears the consequences of believing in many of the things she's experienced since she was a little girl, in Hereford... disturbingly close to The Red House for a couple traumatic years of childhood, she soon realizes.
Neville's portrayal of a mind besieged from within and without by the seemingly impossible reminds me a lot of many horror stories and novels by genre great Ramsey Campbell. An extended sequence in which Catherine attends a puppet show in the small village near the Red House is the most Campbell-like thing in the novel, a masterpiece of horror achieved through environmental description and the accumulation of disquieting details, partially glimpsed.
The character of Catherine has been a problem for some reviewers of this novel. I find her a compelling figure. Her mental problems are sympathetically and convincingly portrayed, as is her lonely battle to remain sane in an increasingly tilted and sinister world. Also, those goddam puppets are terrifying. Highly recommended.
Some Will Not Sleep: Selected Horrors (2016) by Adam L.G. Nevill: containing the following stories:
- Where Angels Come In (2005): The first story of Nevill's I remember reading is a doozy of a nod to classic ghost stories, but with a very contemporary, ground-level feel to it. Statues that appear midway through the story all represent M.R. James stories, though the overall effect is closer to Robert Aickman.
- The Original Occupant (2005): A sort of dry run for Nevill's novel The Ritual, told in a very traditional, M.R. Jamesian way.
- Mother's Milk (2003): Weird and horrifying and strange, a nightmarish piece that's the earliest written story in this book, from Nevill's days in a creative writing program.
- Yellow Teeth (2008): A sort of dry run for Nevill's novel Under a Watchful Eye, a tale of roommate-based horror that could be entitled "The Thing That Wouldn't Leave."
- Pig Thing (2012): For me, the weakest story in this volume primarily because it seems more like the preamble to a horror story than a horror story, and as such simply ends in nihilism.
- What Hath God Wrought? (2011): Nevill nods to his love of Western novels and movies in this tale of an evil offshoot of Mormonism (note that classic Western novelist often used Mormons as villains in his Westerns).
- Doll Hands (2013): Drawing on his experience as a night porter at an exclusive condominium, Nevill depicts a bleak and horrible future world of cannibalism and dire mutation.
- To Forget and Be Forgotten (2009): Again drawing on his experience as a night porter at an exclusive condominium, Nevill depicts a bleak and horrible present-day world of money and decay. Nevill would revisit his night portering days in his novel Apartment 16.
- The Ancestors (2009): A nod to Japanese horror and creepy toys.
- The Age of Entitlement (2012): In a weird way, a dystopic future take on Withnail and I.
- Florrie (2011): An affecting, brief take on houses and hauntings and the malign influence of the past.
Overall: There are some uneven spots in this collection, as one would expect from an attempt to cover the first 15 years of Nevill's writing career (and the first ten years of being published as a professional writer). Nonetheless, this is an excellent introduction to Nevill's work, and a very strong horror collection on any merits and not just as a "first collection." Nevill's strengths at characterization and disturbing descriptions of settings are fully evident, as are his concerns with life among the poor and over-worked. Highly recommended.
Hasty for the Dark: Selected Horrors (2017) by Adam L.G. Nevill: containing the following stories:
- On All London Underground Lines (2010): A bad day getting to work on the London Underground gets progressively worse.
- The Angels of London (2013): Some cheap apartments come at a great cost. Manages to be both cosmically and normatively creepy. The characteristics of the apartment super will be reprised in No One Gets Out Alive, though not the actual character. He's a stunning bit of punk-Dickensian grotesquery.
- Always in Our Hearts (2013): Some cab drivers are jerks. Almost an EC Comics Revenge story.
- Eumenides (The Benevolent Ladies) (2017): Sometimes a zoo is not the zoo you expect. A fine Robert Aickman homage.
- The Days of Our Lives (2016): A really bad relationship.
- Hippocampus (2015): Something is wrong with the container ship.
- Call the Name (2015): A really solid H.P. Lovecraft homage using the lens of some contemporary thinking on evolution.
- White Light, White Heat (2016): A dystopic look at the politics and economic of publishing.
- Little Black Lamb (2017): Murder sites and a dandy nod to Ramsey Campbell.
Overall: Highly recommended collection of horror stories from Adam Nevill running the gamut from the gross-out to the cosmic and visionary, sometimes in the same story. His grip on setting and the vagaries of disturbed though often sympathetic personalities is sure throughout, and none of the horrors are stereotypical; rather the opposite. This is Nevill's second collection from his own imprint, bringing the stories he wants to have collected up to the present-day (as of 2017, anyway).
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: 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.
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.
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.
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.
The Ritual (2011) by Adam Nevill: English 30-somethings Dom, Phil, Luke, and Hutch were best friends in college. Every year since they go on a trip. This year, they've gone hiking and camping in Sweden's famed hiking and camping area, the name of which escapes me but which I know is very old-growth forest bordering Norway.
Tensions run a bit high this year, especially between under-employed-singleton-with-rage-issues Luke and the married, seemingly comfortable Hutch, Dom, and Phil. Then they take a shortcut because Dom sprained his ankle. Thus ensues the horror.
Adapted into a pretty solid movie, The Ritual nonetheless is much different than that movie, especially in terms of character motivations. Well, and the last third. The last third of the novel is crazy, a bit too verbose, and perhaps a bit too invested in the suffering of one of its characters.
Or perhaps not. I could argue that the last third of the novel torments that character very intentionally as a nod to Christ's sufferings on the road to Calvary. The four friends are pitted against Something in the woods that is very un-Christian.
Anyway, it's a terrific novel of horrors both cosmic and visceral (very literally visceral at points), better on my second reading of it. The dynamics of how the four men stupidly take a shortcut to disaster is convincing in its human-scale hubris. The Creature and all the horrors surrounding it are convincing. Did I say Creature? Or is there a Creature? Could it just be humans who are bedevilling our Fractious Four? Highly recommended.
See Also
The Ritual (2018): adapted by Joe Barton from the novel by Adam Nevill; directed by David Bruckner; starring Rafe Spall (Luke), Arsher Ali (Phil), Robert James Collier (Hutch), Sam Troughton (Dom), and Paul Reid (Robert): Tense and gripping horror movie follows four 30-something British friends on their annual holiday together, this time into the woods in Sweden.
Adapted from a much more sprawling Adam Nevill novel, The Ritual explores that novel's themes within the context of films that include Deliverance and Straw Dogs, as the action tests the "manhood" of its protagonist. Rafe Spall plays that protagonist, guilt-ridden over a recent event involving these friends and starkly realistic in his fear and indecision. The acting by the six principal actors is believable and the action tense. There is something of a slow build for the first 45 minutes.
Gratifyingly, The Ritual avoids the stereotypes of the genre of Bad Camping Horror Movies. Well, except for the one in which people take a shortcut. But that is explained in the context of the events of the movie. It also works as a riff on masculinity and competence, much as the sidelining of Burt Reynolds' macho man in Deliverance does -- the competent man is perhaps not as competent as he seems, or the less competent man must rise up. Take it as you will.
Adapters Joe Barton and David Bruckner eschew some of the movie's more baroque climactic moments, probably with good cause -- faithfully adapted, The Ritual would be six hours long and have an hour-long climax. The monster is kept mostly shrouded, though its appearance at the end is a triumph of weird-creature design. Prior to that, the film does a nice job of playing hide-and-seek with glimpses of the creature, which has a disconcerting ability to be 'in the shot' without the viewer immediately realizing it... much less the characters. Highly recommended.
The Ritual by Adam Nevill (2011): Four British friends (Luke, Dom, Phil, and Hutch) who first met in university 15 years earlier decide to go camping in Sweden for their 15th anniversary reunion. Tensions start to run a bit high, as Luke begins to chafe at what he feels is the derogatory attitude of two of the others to his low-income, high-freedom lifestyle. But when the group finds an animal so mutilated as to be unrecognizable hanging fifteen feet up in a tree, social frictions gradually start to seem less important. Something is out there, and they are lost because the most competent of them decided to try a short-cut. Oops.
In the small but sturdy sub-genre of 'camping trips gone wrong', The Ritual is a humdinger. Nevill has a sure hand with characterization, giving all the characters reasons for their behaviour, and eliciting sympathy in the face of whatever it is that's out there just beyond the firelight.
One of the things that elevates The Ritual above the run-of-the-mill is Nevill's careful attention to describing the problems of navigating a forest that hasn't been navigated by people for hundreds of years, if ever. His characters are pursued through a forest that has reduced their speed to a near-crawl. Whatever it is that pursues them is never seen clearly. And the forest seems only to want them to go on one specific path -- to a moldering house, an ancient graveyard complete with an ancient dolmen and a passage graveyard, and beyond.
There are glimpses of something in the trees improbably big, and sounds of trees crashing down in the distance. Food and water run scarce. Two of the four are injured and unable to make good time. Night keeps arrving too soon.
Nevill acknowledges the influences of both fiction and non-fiction work -- this may be one of the first novels to owe a debt to both Into the Wild and Arthur Machen's "The White People." But this is a striking work on its own, perhaps in need of a bit of trimming in its second half, but overall a riveting horror novel. Highly recommended.
