Nevill Part One

It’s been a long couple of weeks for me– my time and energy was focused on two things: getting through all of my doctors appointments and the teen. They are graduating from high school this year, and it feels like I’ve pulled out all my hair trying to counter their senioritis. The good news is I got a few more Nevill books read while in the waiting room, pulling. The bad news being the imminent baldness.

Banquet for the Damned: 3.5. Dante is one half of the otherwise fractured hair metal band, Sister Morphine. The other half is Tom, a lothario who slept with the former drummer’s long-time girlfriend, as well as “stealing” and emotionally mistreating the woman Dante has a crush on, Imogene. Dante decides to participate in some good old escapism— with Tom in tow— and go to Scotland to work as a research assistant and complete a concept album with his idol, Eliot Coldwell. Coldwell is an old-school occultist who loves nothing more than lots of LSD and communicating with the dead.

When they get to St. Andrews, things aren’t as promising as they first appeared. Dante and Tom arrive as the authorities pull a dismembered arm out of the ocean. One of Coldwell’s previous research assistants committed suicide by lighting his entire car on fire with him inside of it. An American researcher is in town, drawn there by an increase in sleep terrors. The students who contact him are all tied to Coldwell in some way, and are losing their shit, sleepwalking, and then eventually vanishing. Coldwell alternates between a weird philosopher and decrepit drunk. And, most importantly, his remaining research assistant is probably possessed and feeding people to her old god sidekick. Academia, right?

I believe this was Nevill’s first published book, and I ain’t mad for it being a debut novel. There is background information– of the school, of supernatural phenomena, and of tying disparate stories together. It’s a story about witchcraft, its practitioners and what they unknowingly and knowingly call from the abyss. The characters even kind of find out shit is weird early on and have a justification for sticking around until it becomes unbearable. They know they’re outmatched. They want out of dodge. They try to get away. Most of them aren’t stupid, just afraid. Those who are skeptical have a good reason to be: they’re just having bad dreams under a great deal of stress of being post-grads or completely broke.

More in line with Nevill, it establishes the theme of humanity’s hubris when dealing with the unknown. It’s a strong basis for his work with invitations and how being the one extending the overture in no way guarantees control. In fact, it means the characters have lost their ability to be in charge the moment the “other” enters the scene. All thoughts of managing the unknown are folly.

Apartment 16: 3. 

Barrington House is (in)famous. It has more than a little fuckery going on because people have never ever heard of closing the goddamned door. Seth is a starving artist. He’s employed as a security guard at Barrington House. Apryl is an American manic pixie dream girl in love with the past. Her aunt owned an apartment at Barrington House. There’s a weird kid and an absolutely negligent dead artist who can’t keep the paint brush or the, maybe literal, ghouls in his pants nor has he noticed the lease was up years ago.

Apryl inherits her aunt’s apartment in Barrington House, an uppercrust building in London that only the creme de la creme (and demons) can afford to live in. When she gets there, she’s more than a little surprised that her dead aunt had become a shut-in recluse and hoarder. She plays dress up, enjoys the crisps, and then digs into why her aunt went batty. Hint: Don’t play with demons, folks. 

Meanwhile, Seth works security in the building to support his career as an artist. However, the building starts having a supernatural pest problem that draws him to Apartment 16. Even worse, when he finally makes the decision that this is a bad thing and he should get the hell out, he realizes he’s being haunted by an evil child and severe physical symptoms whenever he gets a certain distance from the building. He’s trapped with his worst nightmare: a creepy, malignant (aren’t they all?) adolescent in a hoodie.

This book is the more refined British sister/brother/haint relative of Cold Heart Canyon: trapped residents, terrible secrets, and lich phylacteries that masquerade as artwork. It did a good job of building up layers of WTF. I found some of the characters, such as the hoodie kid, tedious at first because they were trite, and I wanted to strangle the male main character for responding to “haunted building, weird dead artist, being hunted by a hooligan” with any action other than moving to the states. 

The book then built on those tropes to become more interesting and horrifying. There’s no real attempt to explain what the artist tapped into, but it does explain why the residents and the building are the way they are, which somewhat satisfied my hunger for context. I was annoyed that these people couldn’t manage to just leave at the first sign of hoodie shenanigans and bonkers aunties— I’m told London has an excellent mass transport system for escaping asshole haints. However, I appreciate that freeze is a legitimate fear response when facing a kid and his ghostly patron.

The Ritual: 4.

Luke is having a moment. All of his friends either have marriages, actual professions, or various other ties to traditional success. Meanwhile, he’s fucked and resentful. But not proper fucked or proper resentful. That comes later.

He and his three friends– Dom, Phil, and Hutch— decide to take a weekend hike in the Swedish mountains, since it’s cheap and Luke is skint. However, early on physically unfit Dom screws up his knee and Phil injures his feet. Instead of following the path to the next town, which would take longer, they decide to take the shorter pathway through the nearby woods. As it happens, shortcuts are bad. Especially the ones that are marked with flayed and dismembered animal corpses. That’s the kind of shortcut that just screams, “Maybe take the long way” in red flags.

First off, it turns out the woods are full of trees, underbrush, and other things that just make it difficult to cut a straight path. They also contain dilapidated cathedrals with their foundations full of bones and pagan idolatry. Under the pressure of being hunted in both their waking hours and dreams, Luke finds out he may be a penniless slacker, but his friends are dissatisfied with their jobs, marriages, and lives. Mostly, they’re all pissed off at each other, their already fractured and dying childhood relationships falling apart as they disappear one angry white guy at a time. 

Secondly, the woods also harbor some black metal artists/pretendy-time Satanists who are super into eating bats and sacrificing humans, an incredibly unhelpful elderly woman, little people in the attic, and something else that also likes eating humans. Luke is on his own by the time he figures this out, and the last part of the book is him trying to make an escape while everything else is going bonkers.  

The tonal differences (dealing with the outdoors then a claustrophobic room) between the first and second parts aside, I liked it. I also watched the movie before I read the book though, so I had some interesting visuals to carry into my readthrough of it. The lack of information here, beyond brief exposition, also makes sense as these are just some random dudes going on a vacation somewhere pretty and not understanding the wildlife or locals.  Nevill uses his favorite protagonist, an unlucky victim who flails at every opportunity to succeed, even when it literally leaves bleeding animals and people in trees (or poisons them or rattles plastic bags or fills the entire apartment building with sludge) to warn them to back off. It really is just Luke sacrificing his friends to learn a life lesson about the appearances and holding onto those and the past. Ancient forest bullshit might ensue.