Adam Nevill

I’ve mentioned it before, but here it is again: I love a good rabbit hole.

Given my neurodiversity, obsessive deep dives are the free spot on the bingo card. However, that also comes with a side order of having no short term memory. I either immediately put it on a list (and, sometimes, eventually even use those lists) because I do have good long term memory and recall, or I binge every source of media I can find until the author releases something else, someone mentions it on social media, and I start again because I’ve missed a bunch of their work.

With authors, I tend to be a binger and check out everything I can get my hands on from the library or the book store. Hell, sometimes I do it even if I think they are terrible, because there are few things my brain likes better than a hit of dopamine from good ol’ confirmation bias. I like being really firm in my opinion that I’m right and complete in that rightness, okay?

Nevill was another one of these rabbit holes— or fucked up barrows in his case. I’ve reviewed his work before in shorter reviews and included those with a few edits. During my final check for this piece, I found out there were five or six more, so I’m in the process of reading and including them. Thankfully, I put it in parts so I have some time.

Adam Nevill likes to tell stories where people violate basic tenets of dealing with the supernatural, the norms of not being a fuckwit are just thrown out the window, and people just let weird shit into their houses, apartments, or satanist dens. And that’s the basic summation of his work: brilliant ideas, lots of folk horror, unknowable antagonists.

It’s the unknowable antagonists— things that just exist because they always have— that irk me. Because existence itself creates a history. Black Mag or antlered giants are not in a vacuum, so where is their folklore? Part of that is on me: I’m good with cosmic horror. I understand some things just exist, and they do bad things without any explanation other than their existence. However, I read for the deep lore, and Nevill doesn’t often write it.  It sucks, because I really appreciate his characters and settings, but I’m blueballing it through the end like a teenager watching porn static for some back story.

Anyway, over the next few months, I’ll be releasing my reviews for his books among my other projects. I plan on hitting his novels, novellas, and short story collections up, but I am not going to venture into collections by other editors that include him. I simply don’t have the time to get that far into collection books, because stupid me would read the whole thing and end up in weird book-land forever. Not the good one. The one where you end up mummified under your TBR pile after your cats had their fill.