Adam Nevill - The Ritual

After debuting in 2004 with the limited edition of Banquet for the Damned, and the novel's subsequent mass market release, Nevill cemented his name just last year with Apartment 16. The book was remarkable not only for being so unabashedly horror in a time when the genre, outside of a duo of giant names, seemed more straightjacket than style in terms of sales potential, but also for the coverage the novel received both in general review venues and in countless blogs, horror and otherwise. Between those two books, and their success, it doesn't seem silly at all to call Nevill, along with his contemporary Joe Hill, the biggest author in horror to debut this side of the millennial divide. The man's new book, 2011's The Ritual, is, like everything in the man's catalog, an exploration of a different sub genre of horror. This time we've got, as Mr. Nevill himself put it in our interview, a "Great Outdoors" novel, and – for a time – it seems poised to not only live up to its two predecessors but far surpass them. Alas, it does neither.

We begin with layers of isolation. Luke, a rebel and loner well into middle age, meets up with his three college buddies for a reunion camping trip through the virgin forests of northern Sweden. But those dear friends of his youth have all changed, matured, and left him behind. Now, together with them again, he finds himself lonely in their midst:

He had been so excited about hanging out with them all again and looked forward to it for the six months following Hutch's wedding, when the idea was first mooted. But the trip had been so wretched because he recognized so little of the others now. Which made him wonder if he had ever really known them at all. Fifteen years was a long time, but part of him had still clung to the notion that they were his best friends.

But he was truly on his own out here. They had nothing in common any more. (p. 24)

But, of course, the isolation is not merely an interpersonal one. Luke and his friends are far from the world, utterly cut off and off the trail in the midst of virgin forest. Into this comes an ancient monstrosity, a manifestation of the forest bent on slaughtering the unprepared modern men that wandered into its depths. The  two conflicts feed off one another, with the attempted escape that dominates the first half of the book not so much a flight as a war of attrition, and the conflicts of personality established prior becoming deadly hindrances that must be overcome.

It's as the hunt continues that Nevill's characterization really shines through. We see everything from Luke's perspective and so, at the book's start, his companions seem nothing but belligerent, Phil and Dom as believable middle aged men, but more homogenous archetypes than living, breathing people. The friendlier, and more competent in the outdoors, Hutch, too, seems spineless in the way that he refuses to take a side. As the book progresses, however, the intricacies of each of them become clear in their growing desperation. Without anything so laborious as flashbacks or extended reminiscences, Nevill manages to demonstrate the bond between the friends with nicknames, reliance, and confessions.

Though it's the devilish chase that's paramount now, it soon becomes clear that each of their catastrophes started long before they first set foot in the woods that brought them to a head. Phil and Dom – outwardly wealthy, successful, and happily married – are each on the verge of economic disaster and are both stuck in empty, loveless marriages. Both Phil and Dom reached for happiness, thought they'd found it, and now find themselves struggling to stay afloat in the world at large and upon their blistered feet in the present. Only Luke seems to have gotten what he sought from college on, but the independence he craved has a bitter cost. Luke's at home here, in this struggle of life and death, but he's nothing else: ability with no hope for a better life. As he says, It's the other world I can't cope with. I'm hopeless in it. (p. 201) Of our fourth character, Hutch, his interesting opening does not lead to as much development as the other two, in part due to his relatively early move to off screen. There are hints, given by the others, that maybe Hutch's middle of the road, integrated but not opulent, lifestyle led him to contentment where their path's failed – but, of course, those views were from the outside, and, by the time of those statements, Nevill's already shown us many times how flawed such views can be.

Through all of this, Nevill writes with clear, utilitarian prose that effectively conveys matters of characterization and action. Every once in a while, though, he unleashes a few paragraphs of flawless writing that's somehow as conversationally delivered as it is evocative:

And what is that hanging from the tree line? Stretched between the black fringe of the wood like washing blown from a line and caught in the high tiers of forlorn branch and limb, something flutters. They could be shirts, holed and ragged. Discarded things with torn sleeves. There of them, matched with three sets of frayed leggings, thin as long johns arranged below. And all stained with rust.

Skins. Stripped from dead things. Peeled off and flung upwards to hang like pennants, about the place you sought refuge in. (p. 142)

Of course, The Ritual is far from the only Great Outdoors horror story. One of the earliest examples, and certainly a classic one, is Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows" (1907), where characters canoeing enter a bizarre and otherworldly reason untouched by man. But "The Willows" was a short story, and so closer parallels, at least in terms of structure, might be found in Stephen King's The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999) and Dan Simmons's The Terror (2007). In The Ritual, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, and The Terror, we have characters in extreme environments (the woods, the woods again, and the arctic, respectively), and in each the environment is personified in a supernatural menace.

More importantly, each shifts from its central conflict of Man vs. Nature (and supernatural beasty) when it comes time for the climax. The reasons for this are pretty clear: in texts so made of inevitability as these, there's no possible climax with the players already introduced but the protagonist's demise. This might be fine in a short story, but it would be a rather downbeat climax for an exercise stretching into the hundreds of pages. In The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, King solves the problem by introducing an outside party, a hunter, to deal with the monster and rescue the narrator. Achieving the same aims with a tad less dues ex machina, Simmons broadens his novel by the introduction and expansion of the Inuit mythology only hinted at in the rest of the narrative.

So how does Nevill solve this problem? As it turns out, not well. At the halfway mark, Luke reaches the dwelling of a group of black metal musicians, the band Blood Frenzy, eager to summon the beast in the name of Odin, great Wotan who mutters in our blood. (p. 283) Now, the problem is not that the group is unconvincingly depicted. Anyone who's ever interacted with the rather one track members of the modern black metal scene (or, as they'd no doubt put it, kvlt), will feel they know each of these characters. There's even an obligatory declaration of "Poseurs!" at the mention of Dimmu Borgir. (p. 268) No, what the fatal flaw in this solution is rests in the soul of this quote:

Though something notable was missing now. But what was it? From inside him, there had been a removal or a raising of something like a weight. A something that had driven him, wasted him, spent him, left him witless, big-eyed and alight with panic for so long.

Fear.

Fear. The choking of it. The flinching and the paralysis. The relentless expectation of its cold jolt. Fear had finally gone from him. (p. 245)

Luke feels no fear for a moment there, and, though danger soon returns for him, it does not for the reader. The spell breaks in the divide between parts one and two, and the novel goes from a momentous death march resplendent with isolation and death to an excruciating wait in a house of inanities. A large part of this is due to the members of Blood Frenzy. Believably portrayed they might be, but scary they are not. They're, as Luke himself observes, pathetic. They are, as he tells them, a cliché. (p. 345)

These delusional teenagers are not harbingers of a grand revolution but rather misfits, and even if they might be dangerous with a knife, they're a damn poor substitute for the supernatural terror that dominated the novel's first half. While that terror wanders aimlessly outside, Luke spends near two-hundred tension destroying pages with the band members, listening to their doomed (full of shit (p. 323)) plans and their shallow posturing, and the fact that it's meant to be as ludicrous as it is does nothing to redeem the section. The climax, when it comes, should be devastating. It's the moment when the characters of the novel succumb to the bestiality between them and leave all veneer of civilization behind, a conclusion drenched in blood and desperation. There Luke tells his foes: "Mercy is a privilege out here. Not a right." (p. 381) Such a statement should shock us, and the developments mere pages later should terrify. But after so many pages of nothing, even drastic character evolutions and the beast's return can mean little, and the novel that began on so thunderous a note ends with an agonizingly drawn out whimper.

The Ritual, it must be stressed, is not without its strengths. Here are two hundred pages so fantastic that they are not only Nevill's best but, perhaps, some of the best ever penned in the genre. Nevill's grasp of characters and tension has never been greater than here, and he uses all of those skills in the first half. But the face painted drudgery of the second half's overlong refuge destroys all that, a noose well positioned to strangle the beginning's brilliance. In the end, this is a novel too flawed to retain its power.

Up and Coming (and Essential?) in January and 2011

The Hammer is K.J. Parker’s newest standalone, and it seems to be filled with all of what’s best in Parker’s prior works (rigorous and detailed worlds with accurate technology, great characters in interesting dynamics, etc). Fantasy Book Critic’s review, the only one that I’ve seen, is quite positive.

I loved The First Law trilogy; the books were snappy, cynical, and vivid. The ending was superb. Best Served Cold wasn’t quite on the same level (it was basically First Law v2), but I’m still quite excited about The Heroes, in part because it seems like a great opportunity for Abercrombie to write what he’s best at in new ways, particularly the focus on a single battle in a short time span. Early reports have been strong. 

FOR 2011

I thought it might prove interesting to post my most anticipated books of the new year and, at the end of the year, see how they fared compared to other releases.

Daniel Abraham - Dragon's Path

R. Scott Bakker - White Luck Warrior

Steven Erikson - The Crippled God
Felix Gilman - ???

Adam LG Nevill - The Ritual
K.J. Parker - The Hammer

Alastair Reynolds - Blue Remembered Earth

Brandon Sanderson - Mistborn: The Alloy of Law

Best Releases of 2010

I've read eighteen books released this year. Of those, four stood out as head and shoulders above the rest.  Each of these books is something I would recommend to any genre fan.

So let's get to some books, shall we?

Review here.

The Halfmade World excelled in just about every category I can think of to judge fiction. The world is immersive, well thought out, and interesting, and the characters that populate it are both larger than life and crippled by flaws. Liv is ineffective and, for much of the novel, incapable of surviving on her own. Creedmore is narcissistic and self pitying. Lowry is an automaton, unwilling to acknowledge that he’s walking right off a cliff. Gilman's created a focused work that feels epic, a fascinating cast of characters, and a gripping plot. I’d compare The Halfmade World to the other releases of the year, but there’s really no need. 2010 has a clear winner, and it’s standing right here.

Review here.

Like The Halfmade World, Terminal World uses a personal struggle to illuminate vast, world changing events. Admittedly, none of Reynolds’ characters here have the sheer power of Gilman’s in the above book. But Reynolds has never been a character writer, even if his characters have grown immeasurably. I read Reynolds books to be wowed by concepts and shifts in scale, to be awed by creations I could never have conceived of. The ideas in Terminal World will blow your mind. The Spire’s varying levels of technology allow clear demarcations within the text, and Reynolds gets to play in a half dozen different playgrounds. Every level is exquisitely rendered, from the opening to the steampunk to the endless wastes. Reynolds’ tone is no less variable, ranging from pure fun to awe to terror, and all in the same ten pages. If he’d wanted to end the book with the characters’ view of the Swarm below them and call it a day, I think I would have still walked away trying to pick my jaw up off the floor.

Review here.

The Folding Knife shares a limited cast with the prior two books, but it differentiates itself by not really being about the imagined world at all. Oh, Basso is in charge of the country, but we really only care about the Vesani as far as Basso feels like being compassionate that day. Parker’s newest novel is cynical, witty, and incredibly deep. It would be easy to make a novel about a single, narcissistic antihero who gets his way and have it be off putting and tensionless, and it’s true that the secondary characters here show a disappointing lack of depth, but Basso himself is humanized by his flaws and fascinating for his peculiar morality. If I were to pick an Epic Fantasy read of the year, it’s undoubtedly this.

Review here.

Apartment 16’s cast is uneven, and the climax is ultimately disappointing. On the other hand, the book’s atmosphere is oppressive enough to smother you on a sunny beach in Florida. Nevill invites the reader along as he splits his characters’ world in two and sends Seth down the dark path. Watching the main character gradually recede from humanity is a painful experience, and it’s only made more so by his occasional intersections with the world that we recognize. This is a dark and uncompromising read that will stay with you long after you’re done with it.

HONORABLE MENTIONS

Review here.

Abraham's short fiction proved as multifaceted as his novels. Leviathan Wept is a varied and powerful work, capable of terrifying you with one story and warming your heart with the next. The collection was brought down slightly be a few slightly weaker stories as it went on, but this is still an essential read.

Review here.

Thomas Ligotti's first nonfiction work is as insidious as his short fiction. The ideas presented in The Conspiracy Against the Human Race are interesting and well argued, if not always persuasive. I didn't put this in the upper list because I've no idea how one can conclusively state that a book of philosophy is "better" than a book of fiction, but this is a work that had to be mentioned in any proper summation of the year.

Habitations of the Blessed is a stunningly original novel that's atypical down to its very structure and framing. This is very much the first book of a longer work, and it's difficult to draw conclusions about Valente's world and its ramifications from just what's here. Still, the barrage of exquisitely bizarre imagery that Valente unleashes makes this a must read for any fans of fantasy fiction or gorgeous prose.

DISCLAIMER

Some people seem to have a rather skewed impression of what Best Of lists actually are. I know that it says Essential Reads on top of this post, but you know what? I’m aware that those are not necessarily the ultimate, objective books of 2010. They are simply my favorite released books of 2010. That does not mean that I have read every book released in 2010 (or even every book I want to read in 2010), or that I have used some sort of unbiased criteria to determine these. The complete list of 2010 releases I've read is as follows, provided to give my picks context and to explain the absence, of, say, That Book You Love That I Haven't Read on my list.

Shine

Daniel Abraham – Leviathan Wept

Iain M. Banks – Surface Detail

Justin Cronin – The Passage

Ian C. Esslemont – Stonewielder

Felix Gilman – The Halfmade World

N.K. Jesmin – The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

Thomas Ligotti – The Conspiracy against the Human Race

China Mieville – Kraken

Adam LG Nevill – Apartment 16

K.J. Parker – The Folding Knife

Alastair Reynolds – Terminal World

Patrick Rothfuss – The Adventures of the Princess and Mr. Whiffle

Brandon Sanderson – The Way of Kings

Brandon Sanderson/Robert Jordan – Towers of Midnight

Sam Sykes – Tome of the Undergates

Cathrynne M. Valente – Habitations of the Blessed

Jeff VanderMeer – The Third Bear

Terror, A List of Those Few Special Scenes

I don’t think that horror is defined by fear. Atmosphere, yes, certainly, but there’s a difference between atmosphere and fear. For me, atmosphere is the creeping sensation that the story’s real, that it’s inescapable, that it’s all around you. It’s what makes you believe in everything the author says and swallow every loathsome idea whole and unexamined.

Pure terror, though, is something rarer. Anyone who loves to read is obviously changed to a greater or lesser degree by what they’re reading at the moment, but to have that change become the dominant portion of your existence, for words on a page to push the fight or flight reflex to such extremes that you’re ready to beg for your life, well, that takes talent. So no, I don’t think that terror is the point of horror, but I definitely do think that it’s evidence that the author’s doing something right.

This is a Halloween list of those few books that have managed to terrify me, that made me forgot all about it just being a book, that had me on the edge of my seat with one hand gripping a the armrest so hard that my knuckles were turning white, frantically wondering how I could flee the room before It got there. Most of these scenes are not the climaxes of their respective books. Sometimes, they’re almost a throwaway. Yet, without exception, they all scared the shit out of me. So let’s take a look.

Before do, though, a warning: the following has spoilers for all books discussed.


To some degree, I think we all fear being helpless, and I’m damn positive that Evenson was thinking of that when he wrote one of the opening scenes in the second novella of Last Days. Kline is grievously wounded and under guard at a hospital. It starts: “Mr. Kline,” said the voice. “We’re coming for you.” And then the line went dead. (p. 113) There is nowhere for Kline to go, no way for him to get there.

He wakes up as his guard is killed, and then the assassin is standing over his bed. What follows is a game of wits, with one player feigning sleep the entire time, the whole struggle between them one of stealth, with near certain death hanging over every action. Unpredictability is the name of the game, and careful plans are devised, enacted, and abandoned, all without the other party ever knowing about their conception:

Inverting the syringe, she tapped the air out.

Now, he thought, tensing slightly, she will bring the needle close so as to inject it into my arm. When she does, I’ll plunge the mirror’s stylus into her eye and will kill her did.

Only it didn’t work quite the way he imagined. Instead of coming close and injecting it into his arm, she simply injected it into his IV bag. (p. 116)

Gripping, original, and paralyzing in its strength; this is how you write a horror scene, as far as I’m concerned.


In my review I said that the hypnosis scenes were horrifying, but it’s hard to really understand just how much of a betrayal it is to watch your own vicariously inhabited and completely trusted body go insane, to watch it betray everything it holds dear:

Stop her, said the only voice left in the world, and as she lunged past him, Judge saw himself catch her hair in one first and snap her head back. She was wretched off her feet. Judge pivoted and threw her down. The furniture jumped when she hit the floor. A stack of CDs on an end table slid off and crashed ot the floor without a sound. Jude’s foot found her stomach, a good hard kick, and she jerked herself into a fetal position. The moment after he’d done it, he didn’t know why he’d done it.

There you go, said the dead man. (p. 114)

Powerful and painful, Hill’s writing leaves you feeling complicit in an act that never happened.

I first read 'Salem's Lot quite a few years ago, on a Sierra Club hiking trip with my family. We’d just gotten back from some six mile uphill monstrosity, and I sat down in the lodge to read. I opened my book, and the two boys within decided they were going to walk through the woods to get to their friends house. As they walked, the woods creaked secretively around them (p. 115), and I started to get a little on edge. A branch snapped somewhere behind them, almost stealthily. (p. 115) Alright, more than a litte. Another branch snapped off to their left. (p. 115) A lot more than a little. Another branch snapped. Well, wait, calm down, Nat, they’re just kids. Nothing bad’s going to happen to the kids, right? Not quite right, as it turns out:

“In just a minute we’ll see the streetlights and feel stupid but it will be good to feel stupid so cunt steps. One…two…three…”

Ralphie shrieked.

“I see it! I see the ghost! I SEE IT!” (p. 116)

I skipped the next day’s hike, in case you were wondering.

But why was the scene so scary? I’m not sure. On reread a few weeks ago, it was still powerful, but nowhere near as horrifying. I think that the excellence was in large part derived from my situation – being a kid of roughly comparable age to the protagonists, in the woods – but the scene is still perfectly developed. The reader, of course, knows that there’s evil afoot well before it takes place and sympathies far more with Ralphie’s whining than his older brother’s rationalism, but the way the atmosphere gradually builds as branches snap, the way that (even at the end) the older boy is convinced they’re at least being hunted by a human foe, the way the scene climaxes in disorientation and uncertainty, it’s all great writing and Stephen King at his chilling best.


This is the first book that I read that scared me, actually. I’d read Cell before hand, and Needful Things, but both were more entertaining than upsetting. This one, on the other hand, dripped atmosphere. We’re a third of the way through, here, and Danny’s investigating Room 217. He goes into the bathroom, and sees the expected corpse in the tub. Well, duh. It’s a horror novel, after all. The woman was sitting up. (p. 326) Oh shit, that wasn’t supposed to happen. Danny runs, reaches the door, but The door would not open, would not, would not, would not. (p. 328) Shit. Double shit. But it’s okay, because Danny figures out how to get clear, so it’s all gonna be fine:

His eyelids snapped down. His hands curled into balls. His shoulders hunched with the effort of his concentration:

(Nothing there nothing there not there at all NOTHING THERE THERE IS NOTHING!)

Time passed. And he was just beginning to relax, just beginning to realize that the door must be unlocked and he could go, when the years-damp, bloated, fish-smelling hands closed softly around his throat and he was turned implacably around to stare into that dead and purple face. (p. 328)

No. God damn it, no! That wasn’t supposed to happen. These things just aren’t supposed to. The kid doesn’t get taken by the monster. He was okay, god damn it, O fucking kay! For about thirty seconds, I was determined to never read another word of The Shining. Then I decided that, if I did that, I would never know what had happened, and that would be far, far worse. So I finished and loved the book. But that scene scared me a hair’s breadth short of badly enough to make me give up on horror, and it did much the same thing on reread.

I think the reasons it’s so effective are fairly obvious, here. The investigation of the disturbance is something that we all know, and we play along with King for a bit when he first shows us the monster. Nice description, cool special effects, etc. Then it sits up, and the stakes raise a bit, but it’s okay, because Danny’s running to the door.

This is where the scene goes from entertaining to brilliant. See, here, horror comes from hope. Danny’s going to be okay, if he can just get to that door, except that it won’t open. Alright, fine, we expect the first attempt to fail, but there is a way out, there certainly is because Danny’s found it. And then King snatches that hope away, and it’s far more painful to have your chances dashed before your eyes than it is to have never had a chance.


The Ash Tree builds up its story of witchcraft and vengeance in an engaging but not revolutionary manner. Your average horror reader will no doubt be able to guess that when the rest of the party wishes Sir Richard a better night, his odds aren’t too great. Things happen exactly as you’d expect. What you probably won’t expect, though, is the friendly, inviting way in which the tragedy is told, the amiability of the words multiplying their effect tenfold:

And now we are in his bedroom, with the light out and the Squire in bed. The room is over the kitchen, and the night outside still and warm, so the window stands open.

There is very little light about the bedstead, but there is a strange movement there; it seems as if Sir Richard were moving his head rapidly to and fro with only the slightest possible sound. And now you would guess, so deceptive is the half-darkness, that he had several heads, round and brownish, which move back and forward, even as low as his chest. It is a horrible illusion. Is it nothing more? There! something drops off the bed with a soft plump, like a kitten, and is out the window in a flash; another – four – and after that there is quiet again.

“Thou shalt seek me in the morning, and I shall not be.”

As with Sir Mathew, so with Sir Richard – dead and black in his bed! (p. 48)

The simple, unadorned language, the easy candor of the words, all of it lures you in to the easy confessions of a friend. Instead, you’re treated to the writhing monstrosities that cover a sleeping, a dying, man’s form.

Lovecraft is unmatched when it comes to atmosphere. A Shadow Over Innsmouth builds up a rich tapestry of history and weaves a palpable feeling of unease. Still, Lovecraft stories are more cerebral than visceral, the ultimate horror more philosophical than emotional. Or, at least, that’s true of every story besides A Shadow Over Innsmouth. Because, see, while I was getting drawn further and further in by the view from the window, something was coming up the stairs:

I was irresolutely speculating on when I had better attack the northward door, and on how I could least audibly manage it, when I noticed that the vague noises underfoot had given place to a fresh and heavier creaking of the stairs. A wavering flicker of light shewed through my transom, and the boards of the corridor began to groan with a ponderous load. Muffled sounds of possible vocal origin approached, and at length a firm knock came on my door. (p. 842)

That knock broke all the rules. Lovecraft stories were about approaching elder gods, about learning horrible truths, about realizing that some cosmic force was about to crush your world without ever really knowing it was there. A Shadow Over Innsmouth, though, climaxes with a chase scene. All of a sudden, the cosmic force was right fucking behind you, and you were running for your life. The descriptive language that drew you so far into the story is suffocating, trapping the character in a world of sludgy details.

I read this story in a sitting at an airport, and I didn’t look up once until I was done. If I’d gotten there a few minutes later, I would’ve missed my plane without noticing until I’d turned the last page. As it was, I was practically shaking when I took my seat.


Sandkings is the story of a horrible thing happening to a horrible person. No big deal, right? Sucks for him, we laugh, move on, etc. Well, not quite. Because this bad thing is an army of sandkings all over every inch of his house. And those things are freaking terrifying, no matter who they’re directed at. It’s impossible to appreciate how much of a crescendo this tale builds to without reading it. The sandkings are everywhere and unstoppable, and the specialists called in to defeat them are slaughtered. The main character runs and…well, the twist in the final sentences is just yet another break breakingly awful thing about this story. Unfortunately, no quotes here, as I’ve been meaning to reread Sandkings for a while now, and I don’t want to dilute the effect by rustling through it a few days beforehand.


Banquet for the Damned’s opening is filled with little dream sequences. To crib my own review:

Throughout the first quarter of the narrative, we find ourselves inside character after character’s heads. They are not in their beds. They do not know how they got where they are. They have been suffering increasingly disturbing nightmares for days on end. Within a few pages, they will be dead. The inevitability of these sections is horrifying, and I found myself reading as fast as I could, sometimes having to force myself to not skip whole paragraphs, because growing acquainted with these pre-damned characters, understanding their thoughts and what makes them tick, was simply too painful. And, since this is horror, I mean that in the best possible way.

Horror can come from hope and from hopelessness, and this was definitely the latter. Disorientation begins the scenes and death ends them, the same every time, and you’re left watching as yet another sleepwalker is ripped to shreds. It’s a night empty of cloud and as still as space (p. 1), and the reader’s all too aware that it will end with death.


So, readers, what're your special scenes?

The Ritual and The Crippled God [Cover Art]

I don't want The Hat Rack to become a vapid place filled with the newest images and jack shit in the way of commentary, and I'm aware that this double feature will bring the month's cover total up to four, so I've failed at that. I'll try and cut down, I promise, but, until then, we've got two new glimpses to drool at, starting with Nevill's third book. In my interview with him, he said that he thought the cover was: possibly the best cover I have ever seen on a horror novel. The Result?


Holy shit, he wasn't kidding. In fact, I'm going to go so far as to say it's the best cover that's been featured so far on the Rack (the limited time frame and generally random choices of what gets featured be damned). If the atmosphere in the book is as chilling as that oozing out of that painting, this'll be a great novel. And, judging by Nevill's past two works, the odds look to be in his favor. There's a teaser of this up here, for those interested. Blurb's as follows:

When four old university friends set off into the Scandinavian wilderness of the Arctic Circle, they aim to briefly escape the problems of their lives and reconnect with one another. But Luke – still single and living a precarious existence – cannot identify with his companions any more. Lost, hungry, and surrounded by forest untouched for millennia, Luke figures things couldn’t possibly get any worse.

But then they stumble across an old habitation. Ancient artefacts decorate the walls; bones are scattered upon the dry floors. The residue of old rites and pagan sacrifice for something that still exists in the forest. Something responsible for the bestial presence that follows their every step. Death doesn’t come easy among these ancient trees . . .

Finally, there's this short story that just went up. Check it out, it's a very short and quite enjoyable read.

Up next is the concluding novel in the Malazan Book of the Fallen, The Crippled God:


Alright, it's not quite breaking news anymore, but still. It's a very epic cover, albeit perhaps a bit silly in just how epic it is. I think I might be the only one who enjoyed the cheesy as hell US covers (well, with quite a few exceptions - Gardens of the Moon, Memories of Ice, Midnight Tides, and The Bonehunters were awful. Alright, so that's most of them.), but these seem to be fitting.

And now I promise I'll try and cut back on the cover art.

Interview: Adam LG Nevill

There’s a bookstore a few minutes from my house with a vanishingly small horror section. You’ve got several shelves of Stephen King, one of Dean Koontz, and every once in a while you get a Lovecraft collection. A few months ago, I saw something new there: Adam LG Nevill’s Apartment 16. Now, having read and reviewed both Apartment 16 and Banquet for the Damned, I can say that Nevill deserves his spot on that shelf without the slightest doubt (though his proper shelf would have far more MR James, I believe). Nevill’s books blend the best elements of classic and modern horror, and they just might leave you quivering in a corner, drinking cup after cup of coffee because you are too afraid to go to sleep. If you’ve ever read and enjoyed a horror novel, Nevill is a name that you need to add to your list. Nevill was kind enough to say yes when I asked him for an interview, and we talked about everything from the horror genre at large to musical adaptations. The results are below:

Everyone knows that both M.R. James and Stephen King are horror, but the two are so different. The classic horror authors primarily stuck to short stories and were generally uninterested in character, while modern authors like the aforementioned King, have works that are built entirely upon the characters’ backs. What do you think unifies the whole field, and how do you go about melding both aspects of the genre together? On the same note, do you think that the supernatural is an essential part of horror, or have books like Silence of the Lambs changed that? If you think it isn’t, would you ever consider writing a horror novel with no supernatural element?

For me, horror as a definition in fiction is that which is written to intentionally horrify, frighten, or to at least disturb a reader; whether it uses a supernatural or a human agent to deliver this result is the same. It’s why horror as a literary field is not solely restricted to stories and novels within the modern field of “horror”, but crops up in many other genres of fiction too. Often, the best examples of horror appear to me in non-genre books.

Like you, I first noticed a sea-change from the over-published supernatural, or animal horror of the late eighties and early nineties, to crime and thriller primarily through Thomas Harris’s Silence of the Lambs. He popularized the human agent as the horror in such an effective way, it made a lot of supernatural horror/crazy animal horror just look silly. The appetite for blockbuster serial killer crime just seemed to leap from there, and many people buying the jaded and over-published horror jumped ship, because serial killer crime was fusing two genres effectively, and more plausibly, and didn’t disrupt natural law so much (one of the hardest things to pull off in fiction, which is why most horror novels end badly, I believe). There are dozens of writers I could name who have been writing borderline horror, within the crime and thriller genres. This suggests to me that the appetite for horror in fiction was always there; it just needed reinvention to remain vigorous. It will not die, despite changes in taste, it just absorbs new influences and evolves. In fact, the first novel I read that seemed to be a precursor to the modern trend of serial killer horror, was John Fowles’s The Collector, which is very disturbing. I thought it was almost the first and last word on that topic: he gets the psychology of his characters just right, and it eschews the sensational aspects of commercial serial killer thrillers.

And yes, I would consider writing horror without the supernatural element. I think 1984 and The Road are two of the most affecting books, in that they are disturbing, that I have ever read. Everyone should read them. They have universal human dimensions that non-fiction and news footage cannot replicate as a warning to us all.

Whether the source of a story’s horror is supernatural or physical, unless a writer is manifestly driven to write about something disturbing – as opposed to merely choosing it to entertain a reader, or to catch a trend - it just doesn’t cut it with me. That’s the important thing; not the source, but the intention.

Banquet for the Damned seems like a very ambitious project in a lot of ways. The writing is present tense, and the novel is very realistically grounded, both in the location of St. Andrews and the number of referenced sources on the occult and witchcraft. What led to all those risks, and did you ever feel like it was doomed to fail because of them?

It was ambitious and more than once I sat back and thought I had failed at what I set out to achieve, massively. I wanted the power of a short story to endure throughout a long novel. What was I thinking? In hindsight, I realise many seem to believe that it cannot be achieved in a horror novel. So stylistically, it was a bloody ambitious book to write, though the occult element may appear conservative and ‘old school’ to many as it deals with possession and witchcraft.

I paid a lot of attention to cultivating subtlety through glimpses and suggestions, as opposed to full reveals. There are no better examples of this style in the field than in the fiction of M R James, who only wrote fiction with the full intention of frightening and disturbing a reader. It was my goal to combine the stylistic traits of the better late Victorian and the Edwardian authors, like James, within a thoroughly modern multi-plot structure that Stephen King and Dan Simmons made their own, and to also write in the present tense to emulate a cinematic feel. If a reader could accept that immediate-tense narration, I hoped the actual appearances of the supernatural in the novel might take on a more vivid nature within the reader’s imagination. Perhaps in a personal film.

Banquet was every bit as much of an example of a new writer trying to achieve a particular set of criteria within a novel, and also hoping that it would be a good story for an average reader who would be unaware of the scaffolding.

In terms of research, as a student at St Andrews, I remember having 40 books on witchcraft and the supernatural on my post-grad library card, when a curious librarian finally asked me what I was doing at the university. It was Lovecraftian – some of the books had not been borrowed since the sixties and I would scurry back to my room and pour over them. I had a year up there and had the time to read dozens of secondary texts on the subject of the unworldly. From that I took great creative license with specific histories and idioms to create the sense that my fictional scholars were authorities in order to make the supernatural element seem authentic. I blended bits and pieces from many documented stories and phenomenon to create my own history of a forgotten pagan god/witch’s familiar that had been called by many different names and moved through the ages, worshipped by one cult or another. I wanted it’s origins and long story to reflect the patterns of how real history is interpreted and revised, so that even the documentation and sources seemed authentic. Making the supernatural believable in a modern setting is no easy task, so the carefully wrought history, the scholars, the academic environment, are designed to add credence to a preposterous notion I wanted a reader to accept.

Elliot’s book, Banquet for the Damned, influences almost every character in the novel of the same name, but we never get to find out too many particulars about the book itself. Do you have the contents fixed in your mind, or was it more an idea than a concrete thing?

I spent a great deal of time reading Colin Wilson when younger, and I think his Outsider series is masterly. I imagined a book that was a curious blend of Crowley with Wilson’s Outsider. Wilson also wrote a book about music called Brandy of the Damned, which is what George Bernard Shaw called music. So my mythical book and Dante’s adoration of it, and the title of the novel, was a personal homage to Colin Wilson – a writer who meant a great deal to me. I’d say reading The Outsider definitely changed not only decisions I made in my life, but the way I saw the world too. Probably the highest accolade I can pay any book. Trying to write passages from an actual book would have been a mistake.

Apartment 16 shows us the world with its glossy veneer stripped away. It’s a place where the dominant emotions are apathy and rage and where people are horribly assaulted for no reason save bloodlust. Do you think there’s truth in such a vision, or did you construct it purely for the aesthetics/power of the landscape?

Apartment 16’s horror aspires to transmit itself in a cosmic sense of one’s total defenselessness; as if the apparently indifferent universe is actually conspiring to enact some terrible punishment upon the individual; a kind of living damnation. It’s horror is also of a gradual psychic dissonance that erodes a stable perception; of actually being confronted finally by the true nature of things, the true horror of humanity, by a swift unravelling of all previously held opinions and understandings taken for granted in life. Everything leads to and ends in incremental disintegration, inside the vortex.

But also, the story’s horror in a treatment of the material world, arises from the essential indifference of society to the individual. And a choking terror for Seth that not only is he scapegoated, exiled and brutally persecuted by those he has fallen amongst, down there at the bottom of the world, of which most people know nothing, but he is also despised by those in positions of responsibility and social superiority. By pausing to actually look about himself, he perceives only the futility of his every endeavour, of his entrapment by poverty and circumstance, of a hierarchy shaped by greed and envy and sociopathic will. The world of the novel is a suspension of decency, of humility, of anything noble or compassionate. And he is trapped within it. It’s why the book comes across as claustrophobic, relentless; I deliberately use repetition, deliberately exert the power of the horrid paintings as a subconscious force, to try and entrap the reader within this perception of the actual world as an unrelenting horror on every level.

Not a day goes by when I am not just aghast at my own species: life and mankind is the stuff of horror. And for so many their lives become an unrelenting horror on every level. So horror fiction is a legitimate reaction to the world, and affecting horror in a reader is as legitimate as affecting any other kind of emotional response in a reader.

You’ve mentioned that, in an early draft of the novel, Apartment 16 did not include Apryl’s storyline. Can you elaborate on the initial idea/version of the novel? Was Seth’s role the same throughout, or did that change over time as well?

Originally, it was just Seth and his dialogue with himself and with the unseen presence that may/may not have existed in the building. Imagine just those chapters? And there were many others I cut out of the later versions that were stream-of-consciousness, or prose poetry. One friend read that version and, fearing for my mental health, offered to come and save me from London. Then I added a female art historian in a later version. But her subplot became too academic and dry – in effect a reimagining of 20th century art, like an alternate history plot. It had to go. I kept bits of that material for Miles Butler and his book, but then added an innocent, receptive, sympathetic girl – Apryl. It was the right decision because her ordinariness then amplified the horror, while also serving to open a window for the reader to breathe some unpolluted air that was overburdening earlier drafts.

So far you’ve given two hints about your next novel. One is that it’s a “great outdoors” novel, the other that it would be awesome as a movie with Rob Zombie. Care to fill in a few more details for us?

The book begins at a moment of crisis just beneath the arctic circle in Sweden, in Europe’s last great wilderness. It features a walking holiday that has crossed the line from recreation and leisure to survival and horror. It’s almost entirely set in a wilderness scenario, and nearly every facet of character and story arises from the action, as in a film. I mostly eschew flashback etc. The story arises from reactions to an unfolding crisis as it unfolds. Very much written in a modern cinematic, thriller idiom too; my Edwardian overtones are absent, but the poetry remains. I also love the Rob Zombie film, The Devils Rejects, and both versions of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and how horror cinema is so often inspired by an urbanites terror of rural backwaters. It’s a horror staple, but one I wanted to reinvent with more McCarthy and Dickey aesthetics. I’d like to see Rob Zombie’s dark humour, rock and roll sensibilities, and character camaraderie used in a film with a strong supernatural horror element, as opposed to a human element. I like his music too; his overall vision, in fact.

We’ve got the perfect movie adaption covered, but that still leaves music. If your dream band came to you to ask if they could do a song or album based on your fiction, who would they be?

What a great question! I’d love to see American metalcore band Throwdown, conceptualise a book. Their Deathless album is loosely conceptual and a classic work. My gut says a power metal band like Nevermore would be perfect for a collaboration too. Marilyn Manson’s musical take would also be superb. Iron Maiden of course, for a song. Avenged Sevenfold of late also.

What’s your opinion on cover art? Is it the first taste of the novel’s atmosphere, or just a marketing tool? What do you think of the cover art you’ve had so far and how much say did you have in designing it?

My take is that I have been very lucky, and that cover art is vitally important. For the PS hardback limited edition of Banquet for the Damned, I had a superb Edward Miller painting; for the paperback, a very talented young designer at Virgin, to whom I only gave key words and a photo of St Andrews skyline, designed a cover that I loved, and that also caught the spirit of the novel.

For Apartment 16, Pan Macmillan scored perfect marks with the first design I saw. It captures both the supernatural element and the literary element I strive to achieve in my writing, as well as depicting the perfect building. It was perfect. The cover for the next book, is possibly the best cover I have ever seen on a horror novel.

Every publisher I have had has consulted me, but I have been pleased with their ideas straight away without any arguments whatsoever. That must be unusual. I blanch and gibber at the thought of having a terrible cover on one of my books. I’ve seen some shockers out there, though British publishers are pretty good. I’d say British publishers are the world leaders in book cover design. It’s the foreign editions and US covers that often confound me.

But writers do need to listen to their publishers. As an editor, some of my authors would want to design their own covers, which were always unacceptable. The sales force of a publisher knows the trade and its book buyers better than an author does.

Let’s say you meet someone who’s never read horror, but is curious about the genre. If you had three books to try and convert them, what would you give them?

World War Z by Max Brookes

The Terror by Dan Simmons

The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty

Any advice for new writers?

Read the best in your field; work at the craft, struggle with the craft; find a mentor on a creative writing course – and I’d suggest a good poet - to improve your actual writing, and get them to show you how to rewrite i.e. how to really think about the choices you make with descriptive language, and with syntax; take at least a one month break between all drafts, and never ever post first drafts to agents or editors. Also, try going ‘deep’ and writing something that makes you really uncomfortable and ashamed, and don’t let self- consciousness interfere and don’t self-censor at all, don’t worry about style, don’t mimic other writers, just let it flow from your core. And that might unlock your voice as a writer and point you in the direction of how affecting and original your own work can be. Nothing is written in stone; you can then work at it at your leisure.

Thank you once again for the interview, Mr. Nevill, is there anything else you’d like to add?

Thank you for having me, and for your gracious reviews! My hat is raised.

FURTHER READING

Nevill has done several other interviews, including one at Kamvision and one at Horror Reanimated.

Adam LG Nevill - Banquet for the Damned

Terror comes in two flavors in Adam LG Nevill’s Banquet for the Damned: the one off and the build up. Nevill’s use of the former, a tactic that (when you remember that these are just words on a page, and we only care because of our empathy for the characters) really should not work, is done through night terrors. Throughout the first quarter of the narrative, we find ourselves inside character after character’s heads. They are not in their beds. They do not know how they got where they are. They have been suffering increasingly disturbing nightmares for days on end. Within a few pages, they will be dead. The inevitability of these sections is horrifying, and I found myself reading as fast as I could, sometimes having to force myself to not skip whole paragraphs, because growing acquainted with these pre-damned characters, understanding their thoughts and what makes them tick, was simply too painful. And, since this is horror, I mean that in the best possible way.

Bed wetting dream sequences are nice – very nice, even – but they alone cannot sustain a novel. In order for an atmosphere to permeate every page, for the suspense to forbid us from even glancing over the top of the book, we need to be grounded in the setting and characters; we need for their every threat to be a mortal one for us as well. In this, Nevill succeeds admirably.

The novel takes place in the college town of St. Andrews. The setting is perfectly realized in the story, both in its grandeur and in the new darkness that begins to creep within it:

This is a home for learning built from old stones, with an elegance to its arches and courts, and a mystery endowed by its shadows and legends. But the aesthetics have shifted: he can feel it. Something has arrived to disturb the calm, to wind back time and reinstall a grimmer place where thinkers burned for heresy and darkness brought dread to small grey towns. (p.66)

Coming to the town from outside are the key characters of the novel. The first of these is Dante, a washed up heavy metal musician coming to St. Andrews for his last chance at a big break and a chance to meet his idol. Now, it could be argued that, in a St. Andrews housing laptop computers and cell phones, a leather clad rock musician would be more bizarre anachronism than daring rebel, but such a thought doesn’t enter your head until long after you’ve turned the last page.

The reader sees the majority of the story through Dante’s eyes, and his emotions and reactions to events often determine our own. When the story starts, Dante is arriving in the town. It’s a moment of hope for him, and, though our expectations are obviously colored by the knowledge that we’re reading a horror novel, the reader sees St. Andrews as a new beginning, a place where anything can happen, compared to the routines of Birmingham and our own lives. Even then, though, there is a hint of uneasiness to the whole experience, conveyed by the police investigation underway on the beaches as we arrive.

Hope changes to despair, the change marked by Dante’s meeting with Elliot. The lead up to and execution of these first interactions between the two are, quite possibly, the heaviest hitting parts of the book. The depths of Dante’s admiration for his mentor, coupled with the disillusioning reality of the man, are agonizing to read about. After that, though nothing truly malignant has occurred to our lead, the town takes on a disorienting, unfamiliar feel that it maintains, to great effect, throughout the rest of the narrative.

An excellent result of our reliance on Dante’s narration comes about when Dante is, essentially, hypnotized. The scene is like suddenly having the color on your TV cut out, leaving you with half the picture. We can still see Dante’s actions, still understand the world around him, but, without warning, we can no longer make any sense of his thoughts. While an effect like this could easily become nothing but baffling, or perhaps just a cause of apathy, it’s unsettling and dream like, here.

Our closeness to Dante, however, does bring with it the occasional problem. While our view of Elliot is tempered through the viewpoints of the school’s administration, our grasp of Tom, Dante’s friend and band mate, is left entirely to Dante’s eyes. As a result, while we come to understand and rely on the intricacies of the two musicians’ relationship, we never come to care for Tom as a character, rendering any threat to him unmoving to us beyond what effect it has on Dante.

One of my main problems with Nevill’s Apartment 16 was that the source of the horror, when it was finally revealed, proved to be unequal to the buildup. While I won’t go so far as to say that the source of Banquet’s terror is as frightening as our corner-of-the-eye glimpses of it, it doesn’t disappoint.

A large part of that is the second of Nevill’s two major viewpoint characters, Hart Miller. Hart is a researcher who studies the kind of night terror epidemics that have gripped St. Andrews. His carefully documented, scientific means of looking into what’s going on in the early chapters of the book give the town’s collective nightmares far more believable weight than they otherwise would have had. Later in the novel, Hart’s research into the occult, browsing through a collection of real and invented sources, fleshes out the novel’s menace without defanging it.

To refer back (or forward?) to Apartment 16 again, the secondary point of view in that novel, Apryl, felt like she had no existence outside of the strict confines of the plot. In some ways, Hart is the same thing, but here that very one dimensionality becomes the springboard for the character’s growth. Up until this point, Hart’s life has been wholly focused on night terrors and, at first, the events at St. Andrews seem as much an opportunity as a threat. As the book progresses, however, and as the danger grows more and more personal, Hart tries to take a step back – and realizes that, not only can he not flee the darkness in the town, he has nothing to flee to. Though not uplifting reading, the character’s questioning of both his efficacy and purpose are powerful moments.

A large part of Banquet for the Damned’s atmosphere comes from Nevill’s prose. The writing here is never flowery – think a gateway rather than a stained glass window – but its simplicity belies the clarity, precision, and feeling that comes through every word. Take the opening paragraphs of the novel, for instance:

It’s a night empty of cloud and as still as space.

Alone, a young man walks across a deserted beach. His eyes are vacant, and his mouth is loose. The steps of his unlaced boots in the sand are slow, as if they are being taken under duress, or as if he is being led.

Guided away from the jagged skyline of St. Andrews town, he moves west towards the Eden Estuary and the Tentsumir forest beyond, until the distant streetlights become nothing more than specks winking at his back. As if beckoned, he then moves to the base of the dunes, where the shadows are long, and the sands cold. (p. 1)

It consists of short sentences and basic vocabulary, yes, but the amount of information (the man is orienting himself by the landmarks of the town, for instance, so it’s clearly the focal point of his life, here) and, more importantly, mood, that comes through is tremendous.

Banquet for the Damned succeeds in almost every way that counts. The novel’s atmosphere – a chilling, claustrophobic darkness that leaves you trying to stay awake with cup after cup of coffee in the hope that you won’t find yourself, in the dead of night, on some forsaken forest pathway – is rammed home by precise prose and well drawn characters. If you’re a reader of horror, Banquet for the Damned deserves a spot on your shelf – perhaps between Ghost Stories of an Antiquary and The Shining. Though, of course, that’d mess up the filing system something mighty…

FURTHER READING

Nevill talks about Banquet at some length in this interview, which is certainly worth reading if you've read the book or are curious about it.

I interview Nevill here.

Reading in June

I was really looking forward to Donaldson’s Gap series, which seemed poised to deliver everything I was thirsting after in a space opera. The opening volume of the series, The Real Story, was something that I’d heard described as an exercise in slowly shifting the reader’s perceptions of the characters from villain to hero and vice versa. From that angle, it was a huge success. From a general reading angle, however, I had quite a few problems with the story. More information in the upcoming review.

There are times when I regret putting up every book I read. Those times are not when I read something really stupid, such as Pog Decides to Climb Mount Everest, because those are fun in a look-what-an-idiot-I-am way. Something like Crime and Punishment (or, later in this very article, Hamlet), however, is a far more awkward proposition. What the hell am I going to say about a novel that has been often proclaimed the best novel of all time? In this case, I suppose I could say that, though I don’t know if I can name it the single greatest, it’s certainly up there, but I’m not exactly being original there, am I? I suppose I could mumble briefly about the horrible believability of Raskalnikov’s decline, the heart wrenching character of Sonya, and all of that, but, really, this is something that you probably don’t need my recommendation for.

Somehow Form a Family is a collection of personal essays from the author of Here We Are In Paradise, Jim the Boy, etc. while I wasn’t as engrossed as I was while reading Earley’s fiction, I still enjoyed his writing throughout the volume.

I’ve always been having a bit of trouble spotting the decline that’s supposedly been upon Malazan for quite some time. Now, having read the supposed nadir of the series, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m just an atypical Malazan fan, because Toll the Hounds blew me away. From a plot standpoint, it’s hard to argue that it’s a particularly good novel, being primarily concerned with fragmentary tangents and only coalescing after quite a bit of pages have passed, but the excellent prose and – yes, I’m going to say it – wisdom of Erikson’s words (I have a full three thousand words of quotes from the novel, which is, needless to say, slightly above the average) make up for that and then some.

Anansi Boys was a lightning fast read that made the tiring business of air travel go by in a flash. Like Neverwhere, the easiness of the read belies the power of its themes and the depths of the characterization found here. I’ve got to admit it: Gaiman is just as good as everyone says he is, and I can’t wait to get into more of his work.

Though undeniably the most bloated of the trilogy, The Naked God had me enthralled right up until the end. Which was even worse than I’d expected. All of which will be, of course, elaborated on in my review on Tuesday.

Hutton has a great sense of the rhythms and flow of speech, but I ran into problems with the play when, after the first act, I wanted to slap both of the characters, one for being pedantic and arrogant, the other for being…well, just arrogant. That combined with the hard to understand, and harder to forgive, colossal mishearing in the final act caused Last Train to Nibroc to not work for me, though it would, I don’t doubt, be different when performed.

I had high expectations for Banquet for the Damned after reading Apartment 16, and I’m glad to say that it lived up to them. Nevill’s debut is a balanced blend of classic and modern horror, with the strengths of both well intact. My review of the novel is forthcoming.

As I said when discussing Crime and Punishment, I just don’t think there’s much I can add here in the way of insight that hasn’t been said before, so I’m not really going to try. On a personal level, this was a bit of a revelation, as I can finally see why Shakespeare is so revered. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed both Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet, but Hamlet feels like it’s on another level entirely from both of those.