The Reddening...a gruesome folk tale

 ‘The past is red. The earth is red. The sky is red.’ The red abides from the opening chapter until the last sentence in the epilogue.

Although I start reading THE REDDENING, Adam Nevill's latest novel, last January, I had to keep it aside for a while until last month. I needed my full attention and for my all senses to be present: you don't read Adam Nevill's lightly, especially a novel like THE REDDENING, a terrifying feast of blood and terror. It simply haunts you for Adam Nevill knows well his craft. He  skillfully sketches his harrowing images to nest in the reader's nightmares and linger there for a while:  In THE REDDENING, the meaning of primal fear is redefined, from being hunted to trapped, in a dark cave or a safe house. Adam reaches the deepest emotions, the panic of being lost in a foreboding land to the sheer terror of finding oneself in the middle of the sea, surrounded by the void: it's a tale of oppression and desperation, of human depravity and evil, and also a fight for survival.

The ghastly openning scene is an ominous introduction of the horrific mayhem awaiting behind each chapter. An introduction to an unforgiving rugged nature and a tricherous land. The backdrop of the novel is South Devon and Brickburgh caves and quaries where archeological digging has taken place. These excavations will bring to surface terrifying secrets and gruesome discoveries: a  real "charnel house" of

human bones, unwholesome carven artefacts, mural depictions of monstrous creatures, scary beings and ferocious animals. A proof of brutal old civilizations that had inhabited this land thousands of years ago. Ruthless ones tainted by blood and murders and ritualistic sacrifices that suggest cannibalism heavily practiced in different groups through times.  These are the first horrifying incidents Kat, once a topnotch journalist in London and who now works for Devon Life & Style, will witness and live. Soon, she will find herself in the middle of dreadful situation, masqueraded as archaeological finds which she intended to cover and write about. It's the hell of red people  to which Helene is dragged as well. A single mother, who lost her brother Lincoln 6 years ago, Helene is looking for a closure for her grief and the reasons behind her brother's death. The unearthly subterranean sounds Lincoln had recorded in his last days will take Helene to South Devon and  Brickburgh caves. Helene wants to understand the only legacy Lincoln had left, maybe this could shed some light on his death circumstances.  The lives of Kat and Helene are shattered when they cross each other's way. Together, they are trapped in a vortex of horrors unleashed by a merciless nature, unhinged folk painted in red and by something unearthly and hiddeous called Old Creel.

Description and prose are Adam Nevill’s prowess.  He thrives in his craft.  It is two worlds that collide in THE REDDENING: touristic nonchalent coastlines, beautiful beaches, a place for the wealthy and the rich  are so different from the jagged cliffs, the dilapited quaries, the secluded trails and forgotten places. And no matter on which part the reader finds themeselves, it's a forboding land and dangerous territories, only quenched by blood and atrocities on the surface and the below. In Brickburgh caves and  below their grounds, old deities creep and pace in hunger for flesh and bones, for a blood sacrifice the red people always  come to offer.  In each step and every corner the author reminds us that no one is safe in THE REDDENING, once there is an encounter with the Red,  either on a remote beach or behind closed doors, no one is safe.

 Adam Nevill excels at characterization in each book he writes. He  weaves his charachters with care and passion. From their physical attires to their personality traits: their desperation, their misery, their struggle and their unbeatable will to overcome the impossible are mutually experienced by the reader. He also has a unique way to introduce his villains. In THE REDDENING, the red people, their leaders and what they worship and serve are drawn of madness and brutality. Their look, their shrieks, their dialogues and sneers are definitely something to stuck around and sink in the reader’s imagination.

As described, The REDDENING is indeed an epic folk horror. The elements are all there. A secluded town, a secretive community, ancient rituals. It's an alliance between a mesemerizing brutal landscape, human derangement and a bloodthirsty entity: This luring nature is not a holiday destination by the seaside and a peaceful sanctuary to which Kat ran away from her old traumas and  painful past and definitely won't be a place for closure for Helene’s bereavement and sorrow. It is labyrinth of terror and fear.  THE REDDENING is an ancient  horror, foul and unmerciful protected by madness and rough earth.

Finally, I can say one more thing what  the Guardian once wrote about Adam Nevill books: “You don’t read an Adam Nevill horror novel: you live it“ and this is perfectly what to expect while reading THE REDDENING. You simply live it.

THE RITUAL, a tale of horror, guilt and a hellish monster

Reading THE RITUAL by Adam Nevill back in 2014 made me hate enormously camping - to be honest I've never been a fan of - and I dreaded more backwoods and shortcuts because Adam knows how to trigger sheer dread and play with anxiety and inner fears. He has this unique intense style to create an evocative and atmospheric realm into which he drags both characters and readers. So when it was decided for a movie adaptation of his book, I admit that I've waited for it with an anxious anticipation. I am one of those who will always prefer the book and scrutinize the movie and since THE RITUAL is a very intense book, I wanted to experience this intensity, feel the tension and fear I have experienced while reading the book; I should have known that a talent like David Bruckner's can make this happen and strike us with awe when the terror becomes real through visuals and sounds in his adaptation of THE RITUAL. What was the outcome of it? I hated even more and more camping and shortcuts in backwoods will never be an option for me.

The first scene of the movie makes introduction of main characters Luke, Dom, Phil and Hutch  with their friend Rob having a drink and planning vacation. Soon the mood shifts and the viewer follows the friends to a liquor store where a tragedy happened. Rob got killed while Luke failed to intervene and help him out. Later on, the viewer is taken to Sweden wilderness with looming mountains and dark ancient forest where the group went for hiking to honor the memory of their lost friend. However, bad luck has again followed them. When Dom hurt his knee, the call to take an off- trail in the forest seemed the most convenient way to continue their doomed journey. The old 'carcass' of a van abandoned at the outskirts, the dead silence that followed their steps and the discovery of a gutted animal hung in between  the trees will be just the beginning of their worst nightmare.

David Bruckner, who co-directed horror flicks like THE SIGNAL and SOUTHBOUND, makes THE RITUAL a platform to convey intense horror embedded in unsettling atmosphere and surrealism, shifting moods between the horrific violence of civilization to the bloodthirsty gods and cults claiming sacrifices in the forbidding backwoods. The psychological element is omnipresent in almost every scene adding more dimensions to the Lost-in-Wood movie. Bruckner brings out this human genuine performance of a brilliant cast to express the sentiments of guilt and shame and resentment. Those unfortunate men try to hide behind denial and miserable robustness, their fear, their desperation and their strained relationships.  In both book and movie, it is Luke who is the most remarkable. He is different, intense and damaged by guilt and sorrow and Rafe Spall displays perfectly his shaken facade behind which  frustration, shame, and anger are seething.

When we talk about THE RITUAL, we should stop a moment to talk about Moder, the  monster which has become the new craze in monsters world, applauded and admired by big names in the horror industry such as Guillermo Del Toro. Contrary to the book, the movie doesn't identify the name of this unholy mysterious creature, but introduces it as the same terrifying presence lurking between trees and shadows, in this ancient place, a Nordic pagan god that rips and guts its sacrifices before its final revelation. Indescribable is maybe the best way to describe it. And like that disturbing effigy with unwholesome hands and feet found by the group in an old cabin in the wood,  Moder stands out as a genius design of both mesmerizing and terrifying abhorrence, scary and one of its kind. In addition, the visuals are overwhelming with dread to grip the viewer's attention and make the unfolding mystery more frightening. With such imagery, the elements of sound and music forged an alliance to create a ritualistic atmosphere that I found epic, raw and tense. A symphony of terror, evocative, moody and intense that starts and ends with a feeling of sadness and grief from the fateful opening until the poignant closing.

There is no doubt that THE RITUAL delivers the classic scares of uncharted woods, doomed shortcuts and friends being lost and hunted by a mysterious demonic creature but these scares have become real only through the smart lenses of a director of great originality like Bruckner because he associates horror with psychological strains and dilemmas and that's what makes good movies memorable.

THE RITUAL is streaming now on Netflix.

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.

Some will not sleep..a feast of horror and weird and grotesque

I discovered Adam Nevill's fiction in September 2012, I still remember clearly the date since I keep a small date inscription on books I enjoyed reading. LAST DAYS made me buy APARTMENT 16 and THE RITUAL and APARTMENT 16 made me crave more of Nevill's books. When HOUSE OF SMALL SHADOWS was released in Dubai, I couldn’t wait and drove the same day to the bookstore to buy it before heading back home after a long day of work.  And so it continued. I chose to write this small introduction about my personal experience with Adam's fiction to illustrate how intense and huge the impact this incredibly talented author leaves on his readers.

I read once in one of the horror anthologies where Adam wrote a story, "If anybody has proved the persistent popularity of supernatural fiction then it is Adam Nevill...Adam's love for the genre comes through in every one of his tales..." because it is evident that Adam goes very deep inside to dredge out these tales. They come from him, his personal experiences, his fascination for the genre and in the unique voice in which he weaves those tales. It is that dedication and passion that engages the reader; deeply entangled in the story, emotionally affected by the images and atmospheres created there. Novels or short stories, the outcome is sheer dread and a new riveting experience. WARNING! SOME WILL NOT SLEEP is no different.  As with all of Nevill's stories, the reader will be drawn to 11 selected horrors and dark nightmares involving the bizarre and the grotesque made solely to haunt and affect minds, 11 tales of disturbing images, of childhood fears and ghastly characters and heart- stopping situations. 11 yarns presented in the author’s very fine prose, his evocative and atmospheric style, his some time simple and clear tone, and at other times subtle and lyrical. Simply put, they are beautifully written.

With the opening tale, WHERE ANGELS COME IN, a child ventures with his friend to enter the tall scary house on the hill which ''no adults like to talk about''. This story fears ranging from that of the old house and the fear of social ridicule and disapproval. Those fears, expressed in the first person narrative of a genuine child voice, take the reader back to childhood memories of old ghost stories and absurd dares. The story is also an homage to M.R James, but like the author said " It is in the spirit of the master than anything else”.  It is in that uneasy feeling sinking inside the reader when the children traverse the gate, in that dread seeping from the morbid stillness and eerie surroundings of the house and its weird statues in the overgrown garden. It is also suggested in that inevitable anticipation of what resides in that sinister house and what would happen to the children if they encounter the residents of the old house?

In SOME WILL NOT SLEEP, children have another two shares manifested in PIG THING and ANCESTORS. As the title suggests, in PIG THING, the tone is juvenile. It is the name given by one of the children to the beast she saw lurking behind the bushes. A story about children who find themselves trapped in their house in New Zealand, new land, after their parents ventured outside to check that hairy swine/human thing. The sense of that morbid, endless waiting the children feel, the hopelessness of their doomed situation in a foreign new place and that terrible thing outside build up the tension and anticipation of what is coming, all this engulfed in a thin film of dark melancholy floating in the air. In ANCESTORS, the author transfers us to Japan and Asian horror. This tale is seen through the eyes of the child and her naïve innocent perspective of the new old house the family moved to, where a new friend lives, where haunted toys also live and move at night. The elements of Asian horror are depicted in the bleak atmosphere, old creaky house, unstoppable rain and in the basic description of ghost with its entangled, long hair and white teeth, of the bones found in the chimneys, the legion of haunted toys with a grudge and the incomprehensible surrealism through the eyes of a child. 

The origins of THE RITUAL and APARTMENT 16 are actually found in this collection. With THE ORIGINAL OCCUPANT, the reader is taken back to those forsaken boreal forests and offered a glimpse of what lurks within.  A different approach of story layers is adopted here. “To tell stories within stories" is narrated in the first person and this time  in the voice of a sophisticated and erudite character recounting the story that was told to him, again in first person, by a friend who went searching for a mutual friend who had disappeared in Radalen in the Scandinavian wilderness  where  "legends of the Ra and human sacrifices " exist. The description of Ra "a wet snout, yellow canines and blood-spoiled eyes” with its fetid smell, brings back to mind the demoniac image of Moder from THE RITUAL. The atmosphere in this story is of a crushing heavy nature coming from the morbid stillness of the backwoods, the rudimentary dark ambiance of the Stuga along with an intensifying terror generated from the letters exchanged between the two friends, the nefarious reputation of Radalen and what lives there, and the horrific sketches left by the disappeared friend.

And before APARTMENT 16, there was TO FORGET AND BE FORGOTTEN and DOLL HANDS where Adam returns to his origins and  his unique territory. TO FORGET AND BE FORGOTTEN  takes place this time in Antwerp, Flemish Belgium instead of upper London. The reader follows the story of  a “gentleman of absence’’, seeking a lonely existence away from a society ruled by human baboons and executive trolls, accepted to work as a night-watchman in the prestigious Dulle Griet Huis, where a few very elderly residents live. Like Barrington House in APARTMENT 16, the overshadowing Dulle Griet Huis has another ghastly face to show. Sudden flits of movements, the shadows coming down the stairs, the doors banging, footsteps running, voices inside empty apartments, all this cannot combat the building’s horrid eccentric residents who were to be awaken from their hibernation. The dread and the weird are displayed in every trait given by the author to those elderly creatures, something taken from a parallel demonic dimension. TO FORGOT AND BE FORGOTTEN is an unsettling story of horror and entrapment and despair. A doomed fate where the protagonist fled the annoying familiar to be trapped in the horrid unfamiliar. In DOLL HANDS, it is 2152, some dystopian future comes out as “painting of Francis Bacon”, as the author calls it in his story notes. In that particular painting he chose to draw a distorted image of humans, where people shed their humanity and cannibalism becomes a delicacy. In Gruut Huis, the backdrop of the story, the rich feed on the poor served by the facilitators/caterers. People are like animals, the rich -Vultures, the caterers are weasels and the poor nothing but livestock. It is a dreadful disfigured realm of disfigured characters  who shock the unshockable. "I am  the one with the big white head and the doll hands’’.

Like all his writings, Adam shows a huge fascination for the grotesque aesthetic and the world of bizarre and strangeness. And MOTHER’S MILK and YELLOW TEETH  were made with the same fabrics. The surreal images of MOTHER’S MILK and the very disturbing characters who live there are exhumed out of the deep darkness of the author's very creepy nightmares.  Starting with the characters, it is difficult to define what the mother and her kin are. A bizarre incongruous combination between bestial and human. Their physical description is beyond imagination, stick legs, hairy back, buzzing, madness. And that addiction to the mother's milk craved by the protagonist/narrator, doomed by his inescapable situation in that place, leaves in the reader a sickening feeling that cannot be shaken away. As for YELLOW TEETH, the story is the invasion of a squalor and a festival of all odours. The situation is summarized by the beginning sentence said by the narrator “I made a terrible mistake’’ when he let an acquaintance inside his house and his whole world is metamorphosed into a temple of filth for a wretched goddess. The sensory images, the meticulous description of each detail, the intense metaphors, the blunt pictures, all come to violate the worlds of both witnesses of this sacrilege, the narrator’s  as much as the reader’s. Simply the story stains your brain. All of this is accompanied by the uncanny elements that find their climax at the end of the story.I should mention that this story reminded me of NO ONE GETS ALIVE, the miasma and filth surrounding Fergal in his summoning  Black Maggie.

The evil cult manifests itself in this collection and this time in the western American wilderness  with WHAT GOD HATH WROUGHT? It is a journey of revenge and culling taken by the dragoon in search for his sister who was taken by the undead Fair-Skinned Nephites and their malevolent prophet Levi. A fast pulpy tale that takes place in harsh western America and that has elements of uncanny and macabre about that Black Carriage, black horse, a preacher-devil. Although, I haven’t read any of Cormac McCarthy’s books, but it is important to say what the author mentioned in his notes that WHAT GOD HATH WROUGHT? was inspired by McCarthy’s fiction with regards to its western atmosphere. However it is a story written in the very unique voice of the author.

In Adam Nevill’s books, monsters come in different forms and different faces. And in AGE OF ENTITLEMENT, it is a human face. When an unstable man discovered that his friend has been exploiting him for decades, the betrayal is killing and the result in Nevill’s world is nothing but  catastrophic. I loved the subtle mysterious tone of the story and the dominating eerie atmosphere. The setting is Battlefields of Normandy in France, the description of the place is dismal and macabre and foreboding, the graves, the cruel sea, the old buildings and those like- living statues and those odd few locals intensify the sense of irritation, abandonment and loneliness similar to the protagonists betrayed hurt feelings.

The closing story is FLORRIE; a tale of an unconventional haunting where the old occupant antics and traits are possessing the new resident. The lingering sensation of the listless soul who lived there, the intensity of its grief, its age and pain, and the metamorphosis of the new resident will make the reader shudder. The transformation begins with an unexplained sense of attachment, by surreal dreams, by manifestation of that indistinct figure, by erasing every inch of personality of the other. FLORRIE comes with a sense of dread not only from the odd imagery- the figure on all fours and its milky eyes are hard to forget-it is also from the desperate feeling of entrapment again that the protagonist senses.

Needless to say that the author’s story notes at the end of the collection are priceless. They recount how these stories came to life and which personal experiences and inner thoughts have shaped them. They definitely reflect a certain period of the author’s life dominated by feelings of frustration, isolation, despair and a deep desire to escape society where greed and inequality reign.

In brief, Adam Nevill proves in  SOME WILL NOT SLEEP  that he is a master of the craft, like every book he wrote, he has demonstrated incredible skills to hook the readers and to entrap them with his characters in a spiral of incremental madness and abject fear. It is how gripping his writing can be, how original and unique the stories he whips up and how real and chilling the primal fears he induces in dark backwoods, in a haunted house, ancient buildings: his frights come along with puppets and creepy dolls, they are inflicted by an evil cult or demonic creatures, dreadful monsters who come in all forms and shapes. Frights to bear for SOME WILL NOT SLEEP, a book that exceeds 5 star rating, a remarkable feast of horror, weird and grotesque. 

Finally a special thank you to the author for sending me ARC in exchange of an honest review.