HR #4: Hasty for the Dark: Selected Horrors, by Adam Nevill

978199724214

Ritual Limited, 2017

my copy from the author, to whom I say a huge thank you!!!

It is absolutely no secret that I'm a huge fangirl where Adam Nevill's books are concerned.  He is hands down one of the best authors of modern horror writing today.  There are several reasons why this is so, but I've narrowed it down to three big ones:

1.  While reading his books, the real world just dissolves so that there's absolutely nothing between me and what's happening in what I'm reading at the time. I think I mentioned some time ago that while reading his No One Gets Out Alive I was so into that story that a mundane thing like the phone ringing  made me jump completely out of my skin; I honestly believe that it's his ability to not only transport me so completely  into the world inhabited by his characters but to keep me there for so long  that makes up part of his horror-writing genius.

2.   Another part of the equation is that he is so very good at transforming inner anxieties into the most horrific and threatening situations.

3.  Nevill is a master of atmosphere who can turn an ordinary sense of dread into a feeling of downright stomach-churning horror where you just know that something terrible is coming, but by then it's too late, and you're locked in for the duration. On the other side of that coin is his ability to sustain that dread (and continuously ratchet up the gut-twisting tension)  throughout an entire novel, a feat that is extremely rare nowadays.

   Now in Hasty for the Dark, he's upped his game, combining all three of these elements that make him a great modern horror writer with his own form of "tribute" to various writers, who, as he says, have inspired his own writing.  The result is one hell of a collection of nightmares that I'm glad I read in the daytime, since had I read it at night I probably wouldn't have slept.  

After a debate in my head as to whether or not I should give a brief preview of what's in this book, I decided to do my normal no-spoiler annotations on these stories, so if you want to leave without knowing anything at all, now is the time.  

"On All London Underground Lines" opens this book, and is a story which conjures up the horrors of a broken lifeline upon which so many people are dependent. And then, of course,  there are fellow travelers and the crowd to take into account... "Angels of London" is in a word, unsettling, and really gets to the heart of the question of exactly what people with very limited options will put up with and rationalize as "normal" when they absolutely have to. Here one man makes a stand and decides to make a change or two in the system.  "Always in Our Hearts" finds a taxi driver who after a series of strange fares,  eventually learns not only that "Life is full of repetition" and that the "same bad things keep happening,"  but in the end, a payment must always be made...  Next up comes one of my favorite tales in this book, "Eumenides (The Benevolent Ones)." It is one of the most complex stories of the collection, highly enigmatic, and disturbing as well.  After a man moves to Sullet-upon-Trent, which makes him think of himself as 

"a caged ape, a primate dressed in a cheap suit, one abandoned in a narrow and littered cement enclosure, forever bereft of visitors..."

he meets a woman at work, asks her on a date, and she decides they should meet an old, abandoned zoo.   While I was reading this one I wrote down "Aickmanish," so you can imagine my joy when reading at the end of the book that the author had written this story "in homage to Robert Aickman."   Seriously one of the best stories here, especially because of the introduction of the Sisters of the White Cross.

from The Mirror

"The Days of Our Lives" follows next, another truly disconcerting tale that follows a couple who meet completely by accident. This one is beyond dark, and to give it the label of surreal is not a stretch by any means.  Oh my god -- it was one of those stories where I wanted out quickly, but discovered I was stuck, come what may.  It also introduces a bizarre, grotesque cult called The Movement, much to my great delight. Oh, please write a book about them, please!!    Next comes the story that made me push aside the breakfast I was eating while reading it, "Hippocampus," which is unique since there are absolutely no people involved.  An abandoned ship is the setting here, and it just may be the most frightening tale in the entire book. Of this one Nevill writes that it shows

"the reader a form of found footage: footage of a place where something terrible has happened."

He's not joking when he uses the word "terrible," so consider yourself warned. After the horror of that one, it was time to move on to a story that takes on highly-recognizable Lovecraftian tones in a mix of horror and science fiction, "Call the Name." The unease is not just due to the horrific future envisioned here, but also because reality just may be somewhat skewed in this case.  Next up is one that reminded me of the work of Thomas Ligotti, but which is actually an homage to the work of Mark Samuels, "White Light, White Heat."   Shame on me -- I've had his The White Hands and Other Weird Tales on my Kindle for over a year now and still haven't read it. Memo to self.   This story takes place in a publishing house, where the workers live in fear of the dreaded "white envelope."  As the author notes, anyone who's been an employee at a large company will completely understand where he's coming from here, but just to whet your appetite,  his main character says at one point that "Sadists and sociopaths had completely enslaved us and removed any chance of inner or spiritual life." Now imagine that idea with a Nevill touch and you've got an incredible story here.    Last but by no means least is his homage to Ramsey Campbell, "Little Black Lamb," which also ties to an earlier story in this book -- I'll leave it to you to figure out how.   A man is bombarded with memories which "repeated like radio commercials" but yet can't actually recall anything of the kind actually happening to him, and when he mentions it to his wife, her response is "That is so strange...Me too."  What follows is absolutely bizarre, moving quickly and deeply into the realm of horror before getting even worse.

By the time I'd finished the last story in this book, I was simultaneously  a) relieved that I could breathe again and b) sad that it was all over. 

As I will remind people once again, I'm  not a reviewer at all, just a plain-old reader person, so I'll let the real reviewers discuss prose, style, and all that jazz.  I'll just say that Hasty for the Dark is the creepiest, best book of modern horror fiction that I've read all year, and you need to trust me here since I am an extremely picky reader in this genre and I do not give out superlatives lightly.  How he will top this one I have no clue -- it's that good.

I'm very grateful to Adam Nevill for my copy of this book which I would have bought anyway, but thank you all the same.

Under a Watchful Eye, by Adam Nevill

9781509820405
Macmillan, 2017
400 pp

hardcover

Just recently I said to someone that I don't believe Adam Nevill could ever write a bad book, and with the publication of Under A Watchful Eye, he has proven me right once again.  There are a number of surprises awaiting the reader of this novel, so anyone thinking maybe they'd like to read it is in line for a definitely bizarre but highly-satisfying experience.  As in most of the books of Nevill's that I've read, while there is definitely a horror story here, the threats also come from within. The author really excels in his ability to focus on a few characters and pull out what's deeply embedded; he is also a master of atmosphere that immediately grabs hold and never lets go until well after the final page is turned.

No long synopsis here since I will wreck someone's enjoyment of the novel by actually providing one. What I will say is that the novel centers around Seb Logan, a writer who has sacrificed much and worked hard to become successful.  Things are going quite well for him -- he's living a quiet, orderly and idyllic life, one he's definitely earned over the years -- until he begins to see a "dark figure"  watching him where ever he goes. But it's not just the figure that bothers him -- soon the sightings, some of which seem physically impossible,  are accompanied by the feeling that whoever it is knows his name, and he starts becoming paranoid, wondering why this is happening to him. Enter an old acquaintance whose presence once again in his life throws his very being into not just disarray,  but utter chaos, putting at risk everything Seb's worked for and achieved.  Because of their past connection he takes this person in, and that's when everything starts to hit the fan and come unglued.  What follows is a record of a spiral into the deepest levels of darkness -- and as Seb begins to discover, it is a darkness from which there may be no chance of escape.

As always, the author has written a novel that completely jangles the nerves as the story,  the dark atmosphere and the people all insinuated their way into and under my skin the entire time I was reading.  I could smell, see, hear and feel along with Seb -- that's how good of a writer Nevill is.  Add to that his uncanny ability to ratchet not just the tension but the sheer malevolence as the story progresses, and it's no wonder that I couldn't put this book down until I'd finished it, reading in the car as a passenger and  long into the night in a Miami hotel before we started our week of vacation. The outside world just completely vanished for hours, which to me says that I was completely and deeply enveloped in the novel.    I will say that although my favorite book is his Last Days, which I don't believe can be topped, this one comes very close to that same level of excellence.  Then again, as I said earlier, I don't think he's capable of writing a bad book at all.  

While other readers may want to go into detail about what happens here, my advice is to not let yourself know ahead of time what's going to happen. Earlier I noted that there are a lot of surprises to be found here, but even more than being taken aback at just how very clever this novel is, the deliciousness is in letting everything unfold slowly.     I know when I've got something fresh, original, and just downright frightening in my hands when I have to resist the temptation to flip to the end, and I had to restrain myself from doing so many times.

Modern horror writers are many, but great modern horror writers are few and Nevill belongs in the latter camp. Read the book.

and he does it again -- No One Gets Out Alive, by Adam Nevill

9781250041289
St. Martin's Press, 2015 (US edition)
629 pp

hardcover

It's nighttime and it's very quiet. I'm sitting at the table in the breakfast room and all I can hear is the tick tick tick of my neon pink pig barbeque clock (don't ask) coming from the pantry room off my kitchen. I'm in the middle of page 400 something of this book and suddenly the phone rings and I actually felt myself jump out of my chair. I'd say that's a pretty good indicator of the book's intensity -- it grabbed hold of me and just wouldn't let me go.

82 Edgehill Road, London is an older Victorian home where a young woman named Stephanie has taken a room. The rent is dirt cheap, which is good, since Stephanie works temping when the agency actually has any jobs for her.  Stephanie lost her mom at an early age, and that was bad enough, but her father remarried and stepmom turned out to be something of a lunatic who has it in for Stephanie for no good reason.  After Stephanie's father dies, she stays with her stepmother, but things got so bad that she had to leave.  Now she's on her own, having left her boyfriend, and finds herself at the point of poverty.  The price of the room is unbelievably low, so 82 Edgehill Road becomes her new home.  Right away she notices something is wrong -- from under the bed she hears the sound of plastic crinkling, she hears women crying, a voice coming through the fireplace, and when someone unseen joins her in her bed, she decides she can't spend another day in the house.  Sadly, she's forked over what little money she has for the room and the landlord refuses to refund her deposit; soon we discover that he's doing everything he can to keep her from leaving. She tries to get help from friends, but everyone's been hit hard economically and no one has enough cash to help her out.  Her situation gets increasingly worse, but when she meets the landlord's disgusting psychopath of a cousin, living in the house turns into something akin to a nightmare.   So Stephanie is stuck while the strange occurrences continue and escalate, and as time passes the situation gets beyond bad to the point where for Stephanie, death just might be preferable.

The supernatural terrors of this novel are creepy enough, but Nevill adds in some very real-life horrors that intensify Stephanie's experiences.  The media (and some social media-ites as well)  and its relentless attacks on her character point to the tabloid-ish tendencies to blame the victim:

"It was the media that had driven her into what two doctors had called 'emotional breakdowns', not the house... Her best defence had been the screaming of her own story straight into the maelstrom of competing voices; the opinionated and ill-informed voices that always knew better..  But she would never forgive the world for what it had done, nor trust it again. Because of how it had interpreted her without restraint or remorse, for the purposes of its own entertainment."  

There were times in the first half of the novel where I found myself wondering whether  this house was actually haunted or whether Stephanie's own mental state brought on her terrors; it's to Nevill's credit  that he can keep his readers guessing at every turn. What I really loved about this novel is that this story is just downright scary in a very "old-school" kind of way, while staying very much grounded in modern times.  So if you need splatter, gore and sick pornography to get your horror jollies, you just won't get it here.  Part one was definitely the best of the book, although obviously it remains creepy enough for me to jump out of my chair while reading part two.

Super super super book -- any novel that can make me jump from the ringing of a telephone is one well worth reading.  Huzzah.  Keep them coming!

Last Days, by Adam Nevill

9781250018182
St. Martin's Griffin, 2013
531 pp
trade paper ed.

(read in February)

 When I read horror, I tend to be happiest with short stories or novellas, but after reading Adam Nevill's  Banquet For the Damned, I know he is a writer I can trust to keep that fear factor going, no matter how many pages he needs to tell his story.  Here, he's integrated seriously creepy, sustained hair-raising horror with a story about a particularly bizarre apocalyptic cult, and the result is one very intense tale that kept me on the edge throughout.

Kyle Freeman is an independent guerrilla film-maker (think Paranormal Activity) who has sold a few projects but still has yet to hit the big time.  He's behind in his rent, owes money here and there, and as the story begins, he's been contacted by Max Solomon, CEO of Revelation Productions  to film a documentary.  The subject Max proposes is the strange apocalyptic cult known as The Temple of Last Days, which got its start in London but met its end in a horrific bloodbath in an abandoned copper mine in the Arizona desert. As Max explains,  the cult was

"A well-intentioned concept quickly usurped by a female sociopath and criminal elements. In London it was known as The Last Gathering. It became The Temple of the Last Days in France, during a schism in 1969.  At a farm in Normandy where they nearly starved to death. The remnants migrated to America, under the same management.  Where they self-destructed in Arizona. 1975."

While the Temple of the Last Days has already been the subject of four documentaries and four feature films, Max wants something different.  He wants Kyle to go beyond the work of  mainstream film-makers. His interests lie in trying to discover whether Last Days' leader, Sister Katherine, was able to "achieve something extraordinary" in the group's "mystical and occult interests," and wants to explore the "paranormal aspects of the organization."   Max has already made arrangements for Kyle to speak to a handful of survivors of the cult, everything is paid for, strings have been pulled, and Kyle will receive enough money to keep him afloat. He is also going to have complete creative control, a film-maker's dream.  Enlisting the help of his friend Dan, the two start their project in the original cult headquarters in London and soon come to realize that they've taken on much more than they bargained for.

Nevill is a master of atmosphere, edge and full-on dread in this story, leaving me with a case of the willies the entire way through. Centering his book around this disturbing cult was genius, and he paced his story perfectly.  The way he depicts the inner workings of this group is grim enough to begin with, but he unleashes the terror of it all piece by piece, steadily ratcheting up the shock so that as you're reading, you start to wonder how things could get any worse -- but they do. And all along, he contemplates the question of why people would be compelled to not only join this group, but even more, why they would stay in the face of such unspeakable horrors.  It's also obvious that he's put in a lot of time researching his subject -- this is no fly-by-night re-imagining.  The only thing I disliked in this otherwise deliciously-eerie  novel is his choice to include a gun-happy character at the end who came across as caricaturish, ruining the spell that held me throughout the novel, but thankfully his appearance is rather brief. 

There's much more I could say but my advice is to go get a copy, curl up under your covers and read it in the dark of night. Super book -- recommended to readers who like their horror on a more cerebral level.

Banquet for the Damned, by Adam LG Nevill

9780753513583
Virgin Books, 2008
408 pp

While I happen to sit on the side of the fence of readers who claim that horror is much more potent in short-story format, once in a while I run into a full-length novel that can throw a continually sustained chill down my spine.  Banquet for the Damned did just that. Although it didn't give me nightmares or produce the sort of night terrors that some of the characters suffered in this book,  the creep factor was intense enough to where I read it in one sitting -- alone, at night,wind howling outside, the perfect horror-read atmosphere.

Banquet for the Damned is set in the Scottish town of St. Andrews. As the story opens, in a "night empty of cloud and as still as space," a young man is slowly moving away from the town, across a beach to the dunes where he's fully enveloped in the darkness.  But he hasn't done this consciously, and he suddenly stops dead in his tracks, confused, realizing he'd only been sleepwalking. As he wakes he becomes aware that he's traveled a mile from his residence hall, where he'd earlier fallen asleep working on his thesis.  Out of the darkness comes a voice calling his name; fear sets in as he hears movement coming toward him. What he sees drives him into the sea, thinking that his pursuer won't follow -- but it's a big miscalculation on his part.

Arriving in St. Andrews are two leather-clad, has-been heavy metal rockers who've driven there from Birmingham. Dante has received an opportunity to work with his idol, Professor Eliot Coldwell, who works at St. Andrews University's School of Divinity. Some years back Coldwell had written a book called Banquet of the Damned, a volume of his "carefully recorded visions and bodily sensations induced by hallucinogens," such as dialogues with various spirits; probably something along the lines of the books produced in real life by Castaneda.   The book was Dante's lifeline through all of the hard times, and now he has been invited to St. Andrews where his hope is to create a concept album and make a musical comeback based on Banquet of the Damned, along with Tom, his friend and companion. The new university term hasn't yet started so all is relatively quiet in St. Andrews, but their arrival coincides with a police investigation underway at the beach where their curiosity gets the better of them as they go take a look at what's happening, and immediately wish they hadn't. 

Also in St. Andrews is an American, Hart Miller, who has flown in from Africa where he's been doing anthropological fieldwork studying the phenomenon of night terrors. Informed by a friend in St. Andrews that a student committed suicide in his car after a series of nighttime trauma, he came to Scotland to hopefully gain more first-hand case studies to add to his work. Posting flyers that direct anyone with "nightmares, disturbed sleep patterns, or night terrors" to come to him for a "confidential analysis," people begin coming -- many of whom share the same basic stories and same symptoms, some of whom later disappear into thin air.  
 The unease sets in from the beginning and increases throughout the novel, helped along by other mysterious characters -- Coldwell, his beautiful young student protegé, some of the staff at the School of Divinity and others along the way through whom the mystery behind what is happening at St. Andrews is slowly revealed to the reader.  In fact, intensifying this edginess is what Nevill does best throughout this book, revealing the terror through multiple points of view, often distorting our vision of the reality of things.   As Dante's hero worship of Eliot begins to slowly turn to disillusion, as Hart's research leads him to a discovery that lands him in the thick of things, as seemingly normal people begin to take on more sinister overtones, it becomes all too clear that there is something menacing and malignant which has "arrived to disturb the calm" of this town. 

Other readers have complained about the repetition of the night-terror scenes, but I thought they were necessary for raising the tension level right off the bat.  Some have noted that Dante makes some really stupid decisions, and that is true, but my take is that in his growing state of disillusionment, he's kind of slow or maybe unwilling to grasp what's really going on.   My issues with this book are in some of the characters: first  Tom -- while you could argue that he had to be included as the first link in a chain of cause and effect as to Dante's current predicament,  we really only see  him through Dante's eyes without any real fleshing out,  so when he comes to a bad end it's not as horrific as it might be, leaving the reader unsympathetic as to what actually happens to him. And when he and Dante have a fight and Dante begins to think about their relationship, the book gets a bit draggy while we have to go through the sordid backstory that I really didn't think added to the tension of the main story.  Second is Hart and  the way he speaks -- it  is so stupid, having him refer to the women as "honey" -- sort of unrealistic for most modern American men. But on the whole, I found Banquet of the Damned  to be  a disturbingly good occult horror read.  There are no gimmicky creatures, the terror is manifested at times but for the most part cerebral, and the tension is sustained throughout the story, keeping you alert and ready for what might happen next.  Nevill writes without going overboard in the telling, and if the object of writing horror is taking the reader briefly into the zone of  the worst that  might possibly happen and letting him or her experience the fear, panic and hopelessness that abides in that space, well, he's done a great job.  The setting is inexorably linked to its already-charged historical atmosphere -- St. Andrews  was once a place of religious martyrs, witchcraft and the cleansing of heresy ; Nevill has just added a new dimension to the already-existing history of darkness there.  It works perfectly, from the dunes on the beaches to the dark Tentsmuir forests.  Highly recommended.