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.
