That wonderful feeling when someone you’ve thought of as a contemporary and peer makes it to the big time. With the release on Friday 13th October of The Ritual movie, Adam Nevill is elevated to the status of Neil Gaiman and Clive Barker, in my mind at least, and I couldn’t be happier. It makes the impossible seem achievable, more so if this becomes, as I hope it will, a Hollywood blockbuster.
In a case of grim synchronicity, the film has already been the subject of controversy due to the unfortunate tagline on film posters - “They should have gone to Vegas”, but no one could have imagined such a terrible massacre would have happened just before the release. A tragedy forcing the media to reach for new lows as they try to avoid labelling a white man a terrorist.
I reviewed the novel, "The Ritual", previously on my blog – link here – along with others, “Apartment 16” and “Last Days”, so it was with great pleasure that I received from the author himself a review copy of his latest release - “Hasty for the Dark”. It is that book I will discuss in this October Frights blog post.
The first story is called “On All London Underground Lines”. It’s a chillingly descriptive piece that brings home the inhumanity of an overcrowded metro station. Having “enjoyed” delays and cancellations on a long rail trip this past weekend, I found myself reliving that experience while reading the frustrated thoughts of the narrator. Maybe it needs a trigger warning.
“The Angels of London” reads like a collaboration between Lovecraft and Irvine Welsh, based in a London hovel with a terrifying landlord. It’s full of luscious descriptions like “yolk-eyed drunk”.
“Always in Our Hearts” is a short story about a taxi driver with a guilty conscience. Nevill writes philosophically about the human ability to forgive oneself. “The ability to forget was a kind of advance braking system of the mind. The effectiveness of his own mental ABS surprised him.”
“Eumenides” - Themes of claustrophobia and powerlessness continue in this short story. The title “Hasty for the Dark” may reflect a desire to escape the desperate, lonely and monotonous trap of failing at life, which threads its way throughout these tales.
“The Days of Our Lives” Oh my god! This gave me chills. A terrifying and powerful story that I find hard to describe. Time, memories and murder revolve around a group called The Movement who are dedicated to the words of a poet who went mad. My favourite story so far.
“Hippocampus” The first paragraph is poetry. When people dismiss horror as irrelevant and without substance they ignore writers like Adam Nevill. Just feast your eyes on this - “Walls of water as slow as lava, black as coal, push the freighter up mountainsides, over frothing peaks and into plunging descents. Across vast, rolling waves the vessel ploughs, ungainly. Conjuring galaxies of bubbles around its passage and in its wake, temporary cosmoses appear for moments in the immensity of onyx water, forged then sucked beneath the hull, or are sacrificed, fizzing, to the freezing night air.” It’s a descriptive piece about the aftermath of a massacre that provokes more questions than it answers. It’s both shocking and strangely beautiful.
Half way through the collection and my heart is pounding. I feel Nevill’s desolate suffering too acutely to immediately continue. It is already a book I want every horror lover to read and so I feel that to survive this journey and do the book justice I need to break from it for a while. With this in mind I will continue my review of “Hasty for the Dark” another day. Perhaps you will have caught up with me by then, hastily absorbing the same darkness and thirsting for more.
5/5 stars for the first half of “Hasty for the Dark” by Adam Nevill.
Continue reading below for details of the October Frights blog hop and prize draw.
