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.

Reading in May

I've mentioned my love of Daniel Abraham a fair few times on this blog, and reviewed his short story collection from Subterranean Press, and so I dove into The Dragon's Path as soon as it crossed my doorstep. I can't quite say that the novel possesses as much depth or power as The Long Price at its height, but The Dragon's Path is an interesting and enjoyable book that serves to set up many an interesting thread for future volumes. Review coming.

 The White Luck Warrior, the second volume in the second of Bakker's three connected trilogies, can be easily compared to the middle volume of the first trilogy, The Warrior Prophet. As there, here we focus on an army on the move dealing with supply problems, and so on – but this book lacks the galloping pace of actions and revelations that made that first trilogy such an unforgettable experience. This is not, however, a weak book by any stretch of the imagination. Though I wish more ground had been covered, and less retread, the writing here is powerful and resplendent with metaphors and hidden meanings, and the thematic and philosophical ideas explored are as insightful as the standard that Bakker has set for himself.

Though I enjoyed many of the stories in The Martian Chronicles, I'll admit that, come the collection's end, I still wasn't convinced that Bradbury deserved his legendary status. Now, having read Something Wicked This Way Comes, I'll gladly admit that I was wrong: Bradbury most certainly deserves his praise. Something Wicked This Way Comes is a story about danger and change, but it's also – and most of all – a story about childhood. The exuberance of its characters and the skill of its prose is mesmerizing, and, though the novel does occasionally verge on the saccharine, there are six moments of awe and majesty for every half stumble. This is required reading for anyone interested in our genre's greats.

 Spurred on by my Breaking New Ground challenge, I began Moon Called and found a fast paced and enjoyable Urban Fantasy book with well drawn characters and a generally quietly believable approach to world building. Though Briggs has yet to show herself exceptional in any way, Moon Called is still an enjoyable novel that promises better things ahead.

 Like Hard Man, Savage Night is crime so bleak and brutal it's impossible to react to with anything but a terrified, strangled laugh. Guthrie reacts to the borders of sanity and general taste like most of us view finish lines, and his characters are slammed together so hard and fast that the gruesome mess that's left is likely to leave you as sick as you are satisfied. This is a roller coaster ride of cleverness and tension, but, like all the best four hundred foot drops, it's best to brace yourself before going in.

 Dashiell Hammett's debut is noir writ large, a single amoral detective pitted against an immoral city. Like Savage Night, this isn't a novel that will win any points for restraint, but the laconic honesty of its telling and force of its words is impossible to ignore. Review here.

 Kiernan's Subterranean Press collection, The Ammonite Violin & Others, weaved nightmarish and erotic tapestries out of lush language and surreal descriptions. The Red Tree mesmerizes the audience in a way as different as can be. Here, Kiernan's speech is unadorned and honest, crude and raw and vulnerable. And the image that she paints is both vivid and disorientating, at once horrific and run through with desire.

 I think it's rather well established that I liked Nevill's first two novels, Banquet for the Damned and Apartment 16 a fair bit. I even interviewed the man here.  After all that, I went into The Ritual with damn high expectations – and the book's first half blew even those away. Here Nevill displays excellence in atmosphere and character, creating a taut and terrifying adventure that rivaled anything in Nevill's first two books. And then, alas, the book's second section began, and the characters were gone, and the pacing was gone, and the atmosphere was gone. Review coming.

As I read the first hundred pages of Stone, I was deeply in love. Roberts writes with all the penetrating honesty of a confession and the intricacy of a carefully considered narrative, and his ideas are fresh and riveting. Alas, soon after the imprisoned protagonist wins his freedom, narrative momentum grates to a meandering halt and never returns in force. Still, the ideas that Roberts explores are interesting, and the prose fantastic throughout. I'll be reading more of Roberts in the future for sure, though I hope that his other novels maintain a more even pace throughout.

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.

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.