FINAL BOY

This is a horror book – Adam Nevill is famous for his “folk horror” books, which in basic terms means people or communities with old deep superstitions and rituals – think the Wicker Man or Midsommr..

The Ritual tells the story of four men who were friends in university days, getting back together years later for a walking tour in Sweden. There’s an odd dynamic right from the jump – three of the men seem to get along very easily with each other and have clearly kept in touch and one is separate from the group and disconnected. So that’s already a great set-up. Two of the men aren’t fit for the walking, either physically or in terms of equipment, so the leader Hutch decides to change the route and take a short cut through a forest.

That turns out to be a monumentally bad idea.

Fairly soon the men are tired, hungry, thirsty, sodden and lost with pains and limps. Things only get worse when they find a small abandoned stone cottage in the woods and decide to camp there for the night.

The animal body they find thrown up into the trees – by a bear? Could a bear do that? Well, that doesn’t help with their nerves.

Deeper into the woods they go – they need to head in a particular direction to get out, but the paths just keep taking them farther and farther away from where they want to be and turning back doesn’t seem to be an option.

This part of the story really ratchets up the tension and dread – it is really easy for the reader to relate to the characters being tired of walking, of being lost, of being hungry and because those feelings are so easy to connect to it makes the more complex and unfamiliar fears land more easily. When you’re reading it, almost at the half way point, you’re just thinking – there’s no way there can be another 150 pages of this – every sentence just piles on more agony for the characters until you are really feeling an ache about what they’re experiencing – it just can’t keep going like this.

And it doesn’t, and the second half of the book takes a very dramatic gear shift – we’re no longer Blair Witch Project but a much more nightmarish version of Misery – with a character trapped in a cottage and it becoming more and more clear with every page that being there is not going to be good for him and it getting harder and harder to concieve of how he can get out.

There are a distinct two halves to the book, and I preferred the first half by quite a distance. That’s not to say that the second half is bad, at all. If I had read the book from part two onwards, I’d have rated it very highly – there’s a gradual unfolding of awfulness and dread and an uncertainty of how seriously to take the other new characters. It is tense and scary and claustrophobic and all of that is so much worse because the opening moments are just relief that everything that happened in the first half is over. But it isn’t.

It is really just that the first half is so exceptionally good – one of the best pure horror stories that I’ve read – completely immersive and it just has you in a grip that continues to tighten and never lets go. You just couldn’t actually do a full-length novel that continued at that level of intensity, so it makes sense that we switch gears – get the reader to relax a little with the main character and then build it all back up again. And this second time around you already know that Adam Nevill will go there and just how good he is at applying fear and sustaining it.

Maybe I’m talking myself round – I think that a second read I might appreciate that second half even more. I know that I chewed through the first half in one sitting and then the second half I read over a couple of days, and when I came back to the second half after a break I did feel really differently about it.

I’d definitely read more of this author – I believe The Ritual was his break-out book and maybe his most famous, but if he’s this taut and intense in an early novel I really want to see how he develops over time.

I guess the trigger warnings would be that this book is gruesome – there’s some really bad stuff that happens and it happens to people that you’ve got to know and it conveys a sense of powerlessness really effectively. I didn’t feel that any of it was gratuitous, but of the books that I’ve written about to date, it is easily the most frightening. (I haven’t written my piece on Brother yet, but it was up there with that)