Hasty For The Dark...a hub for the strange and weird

There is a reason why Adam Nevill is a recipient of many consecutive awards for best novel and best collection of contemporary horror. Simply because,  his craft is an accomplished work of art on all levels: tales of the strange and weird arising from the familiar, characters featuring  from different pockets of life, confronting fears, desires, anxieties in an extraordinary situations. This astonishing talent of his to induce sheer fear and unease in the readers is always something to praise, especially when it is delivered in the author's particular brilliant style, his beautiful prose and unique descriptions. Such talent brings us this time nine dark stories collected in a new book HASTY FOR THE DARK.

Like the precedent collection, HASTY FOR THE DARK is a good twisted treat to all horror fans and readers who appreciate odd tales and fine scares of the dark world of Adam Nevill.  And like H.P Lovecraft says, the greatest fear is the fear of the unknown, these stories are speculative and mysterious, where the characters try to subdue desperate situations, frustration and desolate existence yet they stand unable to escape the foreshadowing doom.  HASTY FOR THE DARK summoned ordinary situations turned bad, characters unwittingly drawn to obscure places, domestic conflicts built on sadism, abhor and blood,  manifestations of cosmic horror and alien deity, memories of a killer projected in the minds of a very normal couple, and a weird cult called the Movement.

The beginning is ON ALL LONDON UNDERGROUND LINES ; Adam takes us to an episode in hell, where his protagonist and his readers found themselves trapped in a maddening interval of time and space with no exit. Having been to London many times, unfortunately, I have witnessed few delays, once on the Piccadilly line while going to the airport to catch a flight back home. The futility and dread that I felt fearing that I would miss my flight brought me to the edge of an emotional distress and inner desire to scream. And Adam described it, the horror is real, the faces are frozen facial exasperation, the tension is contagious, masses of heads continue to flow, stand there waiting and waiting. A platform in hell. This fear of entrapment in time and place, powerlessness to leave or change the situation, the dark shadows from tunnels. What if you get entrapped here forever? The imagery of the place and commuters is decayed and weathered, reminiscent of old bad nightmare.

THE ANGELS OF LONDON is the second story taking residence in London where old horrors are conjured up, those of rented places and shady landlords. A cross reference to Adam’s novel NO ONE GETS OUT ALIVE, this story features Frank the unfortunate tenant, down on his luck, in a rented room above a derelict bar in London. Frank's frustration is presque universal, related to everyone experiencing rental crises of inappropriate accommodation or greedy dishonest landlords. So, when his landlord, the ever shifty Granby, asked for a rent increase, Frank loses his temper and makes a terrible mistake of infuriating  the cryptic family that actually owns the place, scary people or maybe inhuman entities or creatures no one wants to meet, less alone  to mess with. Like in NOGOA, when poverty and bad luck meet, only bad choices and desperate solutions are taken and Frank is no different. In his worst moment, he will use some very unusual ways to survive. The visual of the miserable backdrop, of the despair of residents damned by time and space, of the monstrous family of Granby amplify the sense of the foreboding and dread.

In ALWAYS IN OUR HEARTS, the journey stops in Birmingham where the protagonist Ray picks up some strange passengers and drive them to their odd destinations. The story opens up with a set of anxieties concerning potential accidents and dangers risen from one being on the road and a hideous secret. With the story goes on, the reader becomes extremely curious about the peculiar  passengers, the bizarre behaviour they exhibit, the peculiar bags each one carries with some kind of animal moving inside, all this is dissected and observed through the eyes of Ray. These trips stretch along the night and Ray will learn at the last fare the hard lesson and the nasty payback. An intense yet ambiguous cliffhanger is left to the reader to decide on.

There are four tribute stories in HASTY FOR THE DARK. The first is EUMENIDES (THE BENEVOLENT LADIES) which is written as an homage to the British writer Robert Aickman. It is a shame that I haven't read yet Aickman, but only read some reviews of his short stories to know that his work chiefly involves uncanny situations, dark places, mysterious women, and ambiguous end. In this story, those elements exist but it is the soul and the dark shadow of Adam Nevill who hovers in each paragraph of it. Jason, a soul tortured by the mediocrity of life and dull existence in Sully-upon-Trent, finds a solace in his obsession with his colleague, the beautiful mysterious Electra. So when she accepted his invitation to go out, she suggested the Sullet abandoned zoo with a very bad history . The eerie atmosphere of forlornness and abandonment engulf the derelict zoo and there the sexual tension and attraction Jason felt to Electra will quickly be subdued by perplex and fear. The description of dilapidated cages, the invasion of bracken and encroaching trees, the foggy shrouds, the evasive Electra increase the bad omen that forebodes this date will not end well.

THE DAYS OF OUR LIVES , as the author describes it in his notes, is the oddest. It revolves around the weird dysfunctional relationship between a couple. Hatred and perversion with a twisted desire to kill only define the household of the two protagonists in THE DAYS OF OUR LIVES. The story is told by the submissive male who found himself tangled and trapped in a marriage signed in hell after he received  a parcel  of an old watch delivered mistakenly to his address. His wife is the monstrous and sadistic Lois, who is apparently a prominent figure of the Movement, the bizarre cult that makes its first apparition in this story. In THE DAYS OF OUR LIVES, the grotesque subtly shows its face through surreal visuals and disturbing behaviour and leaves a ” weird” taste in mouth. The portrait of a psychopath is sketched here. This story is  reminiscent of the dark rooms of  NO ONE GETS OUT ALIVE  and the victims buried underneath. The notorious ML Hazzard, the cross-dressing traveler from the grey lands, is delightfully mentioned in the sphere of this story.

In HIPPOCAMPUS, Adam opts a different approach, a story, acted as a found footage with no characters. In my opinion, I find this kind of stories very challenging  to grip and maintain the reader's interest keeping up with descriptions and details. And Adam never fails to amaze. In this abandoned freighter sailing across the inky water of the sea, the “footage” introduces the massive bulk vessel before going inside and dissects its creepy compartments. The tension and dread increase with every found image  and left object until a climax is reached. But what makes this story even scarier is the forthcoming danger getting closer to the shores. Beautifully crafted,  HIPPOCAMPUS also stands as a lyrical piece of writing to enjoy.

The second tribute story is CALL THE NAME. The Lovecraftian mythos visit the futuristic world of Adam Nevill.  Cthulhu is called by Earth after humans destroyed  it and exhausted its sources. Set in the time of LOST GIRL, CALL THE NAME is the longest story in the collection told by Cleo, a septuagenarian scientist who suffers from dementia.  Cleo and her forebears knew that the old one,  the harrowing visitor, residing in the deep see, has half-opened its scary eye after being  stirred from its slumber and "fatally roused" by our careless behaviour and stupid arrogance towards the Earth. Very detailed accounts of human atrocities of drying out Earth resources, changing its climate, altering its natural balance in addition to the accounts about geological ages, cull of prehistoric creatures, erosion, earthquakes, all act as bleak images the reader had saw in LOST GIRL. These images come to revive an unsettling fear about the bleak future that awaits us if we continue in our destruction to our surroundings. The aesthetic visual are present in the meticulous description of  the maritime world along the coastal paths and coves, etc. Those scientific facts, if I can say, are told with a riveting prose without having the tedious effect and grey dullness of realism, all this reflects the gripping writing style that Adam has. The lovecraftian fear from the unknown anticipates a dreadful unfathomable end. Together, the reader and Cleo pray that her visions and those hideous calls were only a product of her dementia but the church, One Eye Opening and Kudas will only add hysteria and confusion to what one should believe. The surreal imagery flows smoothly along the mysterious sea and its eerie coves.

WHITE LIGHT, WHITE HEAT is the third tribute story, written in the vein of British writer, Mark Samuel whom, unfortunately,  I haven't heard of until I came across this gem. In WHITE LIGHT, WHITE HEAT, the author echoes a true ugly image of the distorted modern society we struggle to live in. The author explains in his notes that he used a window in this story to vent about his “ own unfortunate episodes in publishing” and  themes of social injustice, modern slavery, callousness of inhuman species called executives come in abundance. In result, we, the ones who live by, will suffer  the fatal effects  of frustration, depression and self mutilation. Thus, the reader feels with the protagonist this resentment, an inner rage and desire to change and revenge against a soulless cannibalizing establishment of executives driven by greed and sadism. The only hope the protagonist lingers to is that unearthly Reliquary of Light he keeps hidden in a wooden box in his room. But when you take from people their only hope, the outcome won’t be pleasant at all and the protagonist rage will be demented. The espoused tone is sarcastic, cynical and very surreal. The visual of grotesque immerse from the infuriating mediocrity and hideous side of our human  nature.

The ninth story LITTLE BLACK LAMB is an homage to another British writer, a pillar in the contemporary horror, Ramsey Campbell.  It is THE OVERNIGHT that introduced me to Campbell’s world of subtle horror and dread emerging from familiar situations, told with a specific black humour. And Adam delivers this unsettling atmosphere of a daily bleak situation but with his very unique way. In LITTLE BLACK LAMB, an elderly couple start suddenly receiving memories  and images which are not their own. Pictures of old forlorn places, overgrown clearing, old abandoned houses, doused in dark bizarre feelings and overwhelming nasty emotions. These visual occurrences will lead each of them  on different paths and to a very scary places in minds. The reaction of one person will continuously shock  the other when that person's behaviour disturbingly alters, mainly, when the Movement invades their once ordinary life. Disturbing and elusive, this enigma only gets scarier and more shocking. 

In HASTY FOR THE DARK, Adam Nevill carries you on a journey of nine unforgettable stops. In each one, there is a bizarre place to visit, an odd incident to discover, a disturbing sensation to overcome. It is  the hub of the strange and weird  every horror aficionado should explore. Needless to say that Adam proves again that he has this natural ability to mess with the reader’s mind for the line between his fiction and reality becomes blurry.  It is a not a mere story you read, it is  an incident  and situation you live.

Mother, a grim tale of desperation

MOTHER is my first read of Philip Fracassi's work and won't be the last. From the first phrase until the final word, Fracassi takes the reader on a journey crafted with a Gothic tone and a grim atmosphere of a world of failure, lethal desperation, and toxic relationships.

It is a doomed situation in MOTHER and this is expressed through the opening phrase of the protagonist Howard "I Know Julie loved me once" which makes the reader expect that the outcome of Howard and Julie story is going to be bad and nasty. 

Howard and Julie met in college where they fell in love and then decided to get married. The story is told through the eyes of Howard, he gave us small glimpses into their broken past, their family background and their differences. From the beginning, Howard starts to show anxiety signs and hesitation about Julie when he saw her odd jubilant reaction after he proposed to her. A sign that their life is not going to be a bed of roses. Instead, their marriage turned to be a vicious liaison full of destructive contradictions. He shines in his career, she sinks in failure and deception and both are self-centered in their own ways; negative feelings of guilt, grudge, hatred and vengeance come to haunt their shattered household. 

With a beautiful prose and fine style, the author conveys all the above in MOTHER. In between the chapters an eerie atmosphere reigns and something dark and rotten floating in the air. The author builds a morbid anticipation in the reader who wonders about what is going to happen next and where those two unfortunate characters will end and how!

In terms of characterization, Fracassi weaves particular characters with traits the reader finds hard to like. A selfish oblivious husband and a sulky bitter wife who together fumble another attempt to salvage the ruins of a relationship but instead they further destroy it. Fatherhood, responsibility, escape, despair are the dominant sentiments in MOTHER. Starting with Julie’s desperation to be a painter and her failure to achieve that; the author shows the very dark abyss the frustration pulls Julie toward and desperate situation calls for desperate measures like summoning something dark from the scary world of the arcane. Her transformation throughout the novella and her morbid attitude are a bit suffocating. The reader wants to feel for her misery but just can’t. Face to this despair comes the exasperation of Howard to make Julie accept her situation and save their marriage. But like Julie, he fails once and he fails again. His intriguing sentiments swing between anger, hatred, selfishness and blame, his inadequate reactions and weird feelings toward his fatherhood reflect a fear of responsibility, a desire to escape but guilt is too much to handle in order for him to pursue such desires.

The paranormal aspect of the novella is drawn with delicacy. It is represented in the eerie surrounding of a dark forest and what lurks inside. It is in the odd behaviour that Julie keeps showing and the tensed waiting for a horrifying climax. 

MOTHER is a cold grim tale of crashed dreams and bad choices, a story where the author skilfully unlocks the very dark rooms of the human nature face to desperation and hopelessness.

I take the chance to thank the author for sending me MOTHER which I really enjoyed reading and reviewing.

Let us go out of ourselves. Let us enlarge...an original astral horror

"In the greylands we found others in different  form. They wept in our faces or clawed us from out of the mist. If they are angels or the souls of the departed, then none should be hasty for the dark.”  And into those lands and that darkness of his latest book UNDER A WATCHFUL EYE,  Adam Nevill invites the reader, to go back again with him to his earlier roots of horror and psychic terror but with a different approach and a change in tone, to  discover a new territory of astral terror, and restless spirits, and dreadful  spheres! 

UNDER A WATCHFUL EYE  is not a traditional horror, it is a very original one of different realms and malevolent things, they are as scary as those diabolic deities that live in the Scandinavian forests, very evil as those small shadows who haunt the Red House, they are hungry spirits, restless souls, monstrous things who are lost in dark dimensions parallel to ours! With a fresh eye, a fresh nose and a fresh mind the reader is to visit the disturbing and the maddening presented in a temple of unbearable squalor and filth. And the fears that are induced in those realms are  multiple, from mundane to arcane; a fear of home invasion, more of a whole life highjack, a fear of anarchy and chaos, where “the imposition of the chaotic and disorderly into the life of the orderly, the unclean forced upon the clean” it is a fear of losing what was earned by hard work and perseverance, where all can be disappeared in a second; it is by an unwanted intervention, an unwelcome person and a haunting grim past, a life can be shattered to pieces! And that what happened to Seb Logan, an acclaimed horror writer, when Ewan, a ghost from an ugly past, interrupts suddenly his idyllic peaceful life in South Devon. A drunk and an addict vagabond, preaching delusions and weird ideas, Ewan won’t bring only his filth and stench to Seb’s life, but an inescapable nightmarish reality that will turn Seb’s life upside down! Another fear appears here, the return of a miserable period of poverty and trust-abuse and betrayal, of a past that Seb tried hard to erase with his dedication to his work, his self-discipline and organization; 

And with mundane fears, come those of the arcane, of the unworldly spheres, of a pure evil where Adam conjures the world of Hades and its inhabitants. It is a place where darkness only lives and to which Seb is involuntarily dragged with the reader: again, the unbearable immense metaphysical manifests itself this time through astral projection, lost spirits trapped for ever. It manifests in a haunted derelict sanatorium, in an unreachable paradise to where the lost skitters on all four, in a dark river in the confines of a dirty tunnel where blind figures wade. To the uncanny atmosphere comes the overwhelming sense of despair that the reader shares with each character, the good and the bad, all are desperate, all are trapped in their shackles, starting with Seb who finds himself tied up in an unwanted situation that keeps deteriorating into a horrible cul-de-sac and ending with the hinderers or the lost souls who are prisoners of the darkness, and in their search for a light that doesn’t exist, they sob, they cry, they claw at the reader’s mind who becomes as well desperate to know if an escape ever exists from the maddening void out there.  

Hades, astral projections and l’au-delà are all new themes Adam is tapping into, but old demons cannot hide. The diabolic cult and folk-horror and lunatic fringe of a forgotten society are revisited in UNDER A WATCHFUL EYE, where no one can be trusted. As for the supernatural and the weird and the strange, who is better than Adam Nevill to convey them! Frightening things inhabit each chapter of UNDER A WATCHFUL EYE where Adam turns the banal ordinary into a ghastly extraordinary! the incarnate and discarnate are overlapping, all of the time, in different spheres that exist simultaneously in the same place, those grueling images of the dead, the inhabitants of Hades, the discarnate, are described as hellish emaciated bodies, bone than flesh, patchy scalps with wisps of hair. It is an atmosphere of the macabre that overshadows here.

Like in every book, Adam engages the reader’s senses to his distinct world of smells and visuals and sounds and in UNDER A WATCHFUL EYE, it is into a temple of reeking odours, morbid visuals and horrific voices. Starting with a festival of  the miasma, the sebaceous and greasy scents, the sweat of cattle, where every hygienic rule is cruelly violated, where yellow teeth reign and unwashed flesh live. There is an abundance of sensory images and meticulous description of each detail, the sacrilege depicted in smudges and stains are here to haunt the reader’s mind! To the images of the dead and the departed, a cacophony of dreadful voices join. The wretched whining, the distant sobbing of a man in the middle of the night, the shrieks and muffled voices calling for mercy and succour are too scary to fathom. Of those visuals and voices, I find the scenes in the train and in an abandoned derelict house are among the scariest situations and should be considered as substantial references of ones of the most  horrific scenes in contemporary horror. 

But within the grotesque and horror, Adam draws a beautiful picturesque of South Devon where he lives. It is a very endeared place, to which Adam calls the reader to peek a glimpse. “ a door in heaven might have cracked to release what glittered on the water like a million pieces of polished silver”  this is the author’s tribute to his surroundings, “an outstanding natural beauty” amidst the sweet beech and larch, beautiful trees, a beautiful sea where water became of an enticing aquamarine colour, a beautiful old harbour, the vivid purple buddleia flowers, all are displayed through the eyes of the author who cherishes everything about him, these are vivid images drawn without pretentiousness or exaggeration, it is a place etched with a personal affection.

In UNDER A WATCHFUL EYE, Adam exhibits a particular set of characters, from the reclusive loner to the narcissistic sociopath passing by the social misfit. From his short story YELLOW TEETH in SOME WILL NOT SLEEP – Adam Nevill’s collection of short stories-  Seb and Ewan originated.  Adam granted his protagonist Seb, some of his personal traits and antics, which adds to the character a certain charm and renders him more dimensional and living! Like Adam, Seb is a horror author but a more conventional one, who writes also for PAN. And like Adam, he appreciates his surroundings , the beautiful English coast where he takes long walks to write and which he portrays as a place inspiring creativity  “if you can’t write here, you can’t cut it anywhere”  he is also neat, organised with dedication and commitment to his writings and he smokes electronic cigarettes. But,  unlike the author, Seb leads a lonely existence where he keeps everyone at a distance, he is a loner that finds solace in his isolation and loneliness. In a blunt contrast comes Ewan, this long forgotten mentor materializes in the world of living and dead to contaminate Seb’s life physically, mentally and emotionally so everything metamorphoses into something Seb loathes and fears. It is the author’s creation of  the misfit, the rebellious artist, the hater and the egoist, a living example of self-destruction in all levels. A wretched squalor that reeks from each pore and breath, a self-absorbed manipulator with set of odd ideas but who never understood himself. And to those main characters, Adam introduces other faces and other evils, a narcissistic sociopath who lived before on earth but now wanders in a parallel sphere, the Master of the weird and something horrifying called Thin Len .

When it comes to the craft, Adam Nevill presents with eloquence a well-plotted novel with a slow burn quality. The tension builds up without the need to rush actions. Three parts with titled chapters is a new approach used cleverly by the author to masquerade a very intense twist and unexpected turn. The cinematic atmosphere, another trait of Adam’s compelling writing style, is to take part in UNDER A WATCHFUL EYE, in addition to the beautiful fine vocabulary and powerful descriptions and the many aesthetic similes and metaphors to savour such as these beautiful sentences plotted with the dust and the shadows and something insidious had placed itself between his life and the sun.

I should mention, for a reader of Adam Nevill’s work, that the allusion to LAST DAYS and its characters, creates a sense of enjoyable familiarity and reminder of old monsters, as scary as those who exist in UNDER A WATCHFUL EYE . 

In UNDER A WATCHFUL EYE, Adam Nevill is without a doubt the Master of the weird , he offers another fiendish book that gives a meaning to sheer terror and maddening and unnerving sentiments and juddering feelings that he intends to leave in every story he tells. Once again,  he proves that disappointing is not a word that comes with his books because he cuts them from a personal experience, carves them out of  a sharp observation of his surroundings and a fascination for the unexplained and the unthinkable and something immense of uncanny nature, all is evoked in his beautiful fine prose and eloquent writing. UNDER A WATCHFUL EYE is an amalgamation of morbid visuals, reeking odours and sheer despair, all shrouded in the strange and the weird that constitute par excellence Adam’s trademark because no one defines PECULIAR  like him.

Hence, to every horror fan and aficionado of the strange, in fact, to every reader who seeks a good fine book with an original story, Adam Nevill simply is the answer.

I take the chance here to thank the author for giving me ARC and which I enjoyed reading and reviewing.