Adam Nevill Part 3

I don’t even know who I am. This is the second post within seven days. I outlined what I currently have read to date. I even got a few of those done while I read another anthology. It’s not meteoric (or even a sprinkling of space dust) progress, but I am eating that elephant at a cellular level.

Lost Girl:  3.
The world is ending. Drought and disease have driven refugees into the UK, far into the country to avoid the rising waters. The Father, during a moment of horny inattention, misses the moment his daughter is kidnapped. Two years later, his life in shambles, and he becomes a vigilante weapon for the police, taking out pedophiles and extracting information about who took his child. If this guilty (and bloody) agenda isn’t enough, he also encounters symbols and graffiti related to a gang known as the Kings, who worship King Death. They revel in violence and sadism, turning torture and death into an artform; they are also involved in what happened to his daughter, bringing them and their “art” directly into The Father’s orbit.

I took a point off for the monologuing in the middle of the book. The King Death information could be important, but it feels thrown in at the last minute, an attempt to supernaturalize something that was a thriller about one man attempting to reclaim his daughter. It either needed less of that or more of an attempt to weave in those elements from the beginning. I feel this is what cemented my feeling that Nevill himself sometimes overedits himself and then shifts the narrative in a jarring way. I’ve been there, as a writer of horror. Sometimes, you just don’t need a ghoul. You just need the belief the ghoul exists. I would have found that a little less jarring.

Under a Watchful Eye: 3.5

Seb, an author struggling to meet his publisher’s demands and floundering in creativity, sees a strange figure while he’s out and about in town— his former very weird and esoteric roommate. The guy turns out to be completely bonkers, infatuated with a dead cult leader who tried to open doors into other dimensions. And he absolutely needs Seb to publish a book on it but credit him as the author. Some people think it’s just that easy, man.

He takes over Seb’s life, first metaphorically by disrupting his pristine existence, leaving mess after mess both mentally and physically, and then literally when he moves some of his cult members in. Seb is pushed away from his life as an author (they even start using his paychecks to live a life of luxury) and into the confines of the estate the leader once owned and all the nasties they left because no one, even Seb, cleans up after themselves or their supernatural shenanigans.

As a person with Autism, this is my living fucking nightmare, and that’s before you get to the fact that the cult just left ghosts, demons, extradimensional beings, and old gods (maybe? it’s Nevill, who knows) everywhere. People coming into my space and disrupting my life are in the top three of sending me screaming into the night. I was more uncomfortable with the slow decay of Seb’s control over his home, writing, and life than I was with people being lazy about closing their circles or doing their research. It got an extra .5 for creeping me out with bad roommates.

The Reddening: 3. 

Tourists disappear in this coastal town. Most people attribute it to the cave systems or their risky sky-diving behaviors, but others think something else is going on. When archeologists discover human remains of a possibly ancient culture, people just throw their hands up and say of course, as those remains show their participation in rites that may be cannibalism or may be that “something else” just gnawing on people. Add in some cultists who paint themselves red, just like those ancient people, and the outsiders who just want to find their missing loved ones, and you get even more blood and eaten people.

I typically don’t do audio books, as my brain has a hard time following auditory information (it almost always sounds like Charlie Brown’s teacher). However, I listened to this one over a period of months while doing my annual mending sprint, renewing the loan so many times it seemed like the speed was one paragraph a month. It was okay. We’ve all seen the local baddies target tourists trope and there was far too much of that, but I’ll take the hyena things we got at the end as a little treat for my brain.