"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.
