Adam LG Nevill - Apartment 16

Horror is, quite possibly, the easiest genre to get wrong. It’s a genre based entirely on atmosphere. It has other elements, sure, but they all matter only as much as they contribute to the book’s mood, be it one of subtle unease or outright terror. A horror novel that lacks atmosphere is a nonentity, the equivalent of a science fiction novel set in modern New York City and following the wholly unremarkable life of a single commuter. Adam Nevill is aware of this. As Apartment 16 progresses, he builds its atmosphere brick by brick, gradually ensnaring the reader in his bleak vision.

Characterization in Apartment 16 is centered on the effects of Barrington House, and, to a lesser extent, London. Seth is a night watchman at Barrington House and an outsider. The other porters disbelieve his story about strange bumps in the night; the building’s millionaire tenants regard him as an incompetent nuisance; and the owners and other denizens of the Green Man, the bar in which he rents an upstairs room, barely know him. His only interest is art, but he hasn’t painted in months.

The presence in Barrington House reaches out to him and gives him his passion back, but, by showing him the world as it really is, it has immersed him in endless horror. Before, he looked out at the world with nothing but apathy. Now, everyone around him is grotesque and sadistic. He’s no longer trapped in his own world; he can see the city all around him, grinding him and everyone else down and turning them into monstrous caricatures of humanity:

Away from this. Oh God, to just be removed from this place that didn’t work. A city regenerating its timeless contamination through the misery of the occupants. That was how it found nourishment. By dousing hope and disturbing minds. By instigating crisis and breakdown. With the shock of poverty and the tyranny of wealth. With the eternal frustration of being late; the suffocation of mania and the binding of neurosis; the perpetual cycle of despair and euphoria; the stares of faces at bus windows; the mute absorption and quiet humiliation of the underground; delinquency and drink; a thousand different tongues snapping in selfish insistence. City of the damned. So ugly, so frenetic. And all beneath the white sun in the forever grayness of sky. Where the damned are swallowed and forget who they are. He loathed it.

Half detached and half revolted, Seth’s narrative is a gradual slide into dementia, and he’s aware of his descent every step of the way, unable to stop himself. Once it reaches critical mass, his story is one of horrible inevitability. His repeated attempts to flee are always half hearted. His consciousness is repulsed by what he is becoming, but it is clear that his is an obsession deeper than his own malleable desires. When he abandons yet another escape attempt, trying to fight his way through sickness in King’s Cross station, it is more akin to the slow slamming of one’s only escape route than a plot twist.

Apryl is the opposite of Seth. She’s new to London, having come from America to sell her wealthy, deceased, and estranged great aunt’s flat in Barrington House. Unfortunately, Apryl’s character is not as successful as Seth’s. Seth’s character can be very much envisioned on its own. Without any ghostly beings in the night, Seth would continue down his slow path of self destruction until he was exactly what all the other characters he saw in his fever-dream-existence were. Apryl, on the other hand, exists precisely as far as the story takes her and no further.

Like Seth, Apryl begins with a defining trait of her own, but it’s both far more inconsequential than Seth’s and too self referential to let us really understand her. Apryl loves old styles of clothing. It could be an interesting aspect of her character, but it’s just not nearly as defining as Seth’s love of art. In addition, having a character fascinated in fashions from the fifties isn’t much of an oddity in a novel primarily concerned with personalities and spiritual remnants from the fifties.

The parallel goes beyond mere interests; for the first ninety percent of the novel, the only real physical description we get of Apryl is that she looks like her aunt from the fifties. The result of all this is that Apryl’s entire being is wholly defined by the events of the novel; I can’t so much as picture her having a cup of tea outside Barrington House’s influence. This isn’t to say that Apryl’s portions of the story aren’t interesting, but that they are interesting due to the things that she discovers and the people that she meets, not because of anything that she herself thinks or does.

This is a novel about obsession, and about insanity, and, at its best moments, we can see the two worlds, real and imagined, at once. Shortly after he begins to truly see the people around him, Seth goes to a supermarket. The scene is sickening:

The tins of tuna that he picked up to buy had something sticky on their dented lids that smelled rancid. Contaminated. He put them back. Inside the sardine tins he knew the silver bellies of the dead mothers were full of tiny brown eggs. Seth burped and wiped a layer of milky sweat off his forehead.

The reader can feel Seth’s frustration and disgust throughout the scene as he smells piss and stares at the filthy, self-absorbed creatures all around him. Even as we feel for him, though, we see the other side, and that is what makes it truly devastating:

A trolley was pushed into his shins. The mother-of-three behind the carriage looked daggers at him and barred her dirty horse teeth. Her breath was a gust of sour yogurt.

“Fuck off!” Seth said, his voice cracked. Grabbing her children against her legs, she stumbled away from him, repeatedly looking back over her shoulder as she took flight. Even at ten feet he could see her mustache.

It’s this contrast – the knowledge that, if we were in the store with him, we would edge away from his raving madness – that makes the scene so powerful. We know that Seth is wrong, and we know that he is gradually losing touch with reality, but his viewpoint is too sympathetic for us to stop feeling his pain. The dichotomy returns right before the novel’s climax, when the two point of views finally intersect and we see each through the other’s eyes.

Horror has a bit of a damned if you do, damned if you don’t problem when it comes to revelations. A book that ends without ever giving more than sheltered glimpses of its evil feels incomplete, but everyone knows that the second the camera focuses on the monster you lose eighty percent of your fear for it. Apartment 16’s treatment of this dilemma is mixed. The majority of the evil here, such as the ghostly figures in the corner of your eye, isn’t scary because of its red face or thin form, but because of what it signifies, and yet we never learn precisely what that is. Exactly how these apparitions travelled from one diseased mind to the building’s very soul is never shown. Seth’s characterization stays excellent throughout (in fact, I’d go as far as to say that his conversations with Apryl are his -- and the book’s -- finest moments), but he’s too pitiable to ever be truly terrifying. His handler, an ominous child in a sweatshirt, never comes into a focus clear enough to really be frightening; his entire existence is like the beginnings of a creepy soundtrack with the werewolf attack left out, all buildup and no payoff.

What never loses its dark charm, however, is the Vortex, a hell of infinite distances and seething darkness. The glimpses seen through Felix Hessen’s (excellently described) art are intriguing, but it’s nothing to what’s to come. The final product is so terrifyingly empty that it may just leave you doubting the reality of the very ground beneath your feet. The Vortex isn’t Nevill’s only success when it comes to terror. A large part of the horror comes in a manner that any seasoned reader is likely familiar with – the glimpse in the mirror, the presence near your bed, etc – but Nevill’s prose and the book’s oppressive atmosphere make for a chill factor that’s far greater than its disparate parts can account for and for a book that’s damn hard to put down.

Apartment 16 has problems, and the climax is a little disappointing. In horror, however, atmosphere trumps everything else, and Apartment 16’s got atmosphere in spades. If you’re a fan of dark, character driven horror, Nevill’s a name you need to start paying attention to.

FURTHER READING

I interview Nevill here.