Adam L.G. Nevill's Blog, page 23

‘THE REDDENING: ORIGINS’ FREE EBOOK.

Visitors to these pages may have twigged that my new novel, ‘The Reddening’, is unleashed tomorrow. If you’re undecided and would like to read a sample from the book, or get started before your copy arrives, I have created a free eBook, ‘Reddening:Origins’. It includes the first section of the novel.

The eBook features one of the first cover designs for the novel, created by my brother with a mass market design in mind. I originally thought of using different covers for different editions but decided to stick with one to avoid confusion.

Anyway, if you’d like a copy, just click HERE and download.

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FINAL COUNTDOWN TO THE REDDENING. PUBLISHED TOMORROW.

“The creature’s torso suggested a heavily-breasted woman with wide hips. Part of one arm had been fashioned, the other side was damaged. But if that was a head then it was the head of an animal. A dog, he thought: a hound thing with a boxy muzzle. In fact, the carving was intricate enough to suggest indents for tiny eyes. This had been made by human hands.

When Matt returned his scrutiny to the darkness of the fissure, his mind leaped into awe at what he held.

Behind his shoulders, the sea rushed in and slapped the pebbles. It then withdrew in a susurration across the stony shore as it had done for tens of thousands of years before this very moment.

Later, when questioned, he would struggle to articulate how he’d felt with the dog-headed thing within his hands. But he did offer, to anyone to whom he told his story, that he’d never felt as insignificant. Tiny, an irrelevant witness and a mere speck upon a great tide of time that surged ever forward. A tide upon which he too would be extinguished: the spark of all he was doused in less than a cosmic moment, just as the mind that had occupied the skull in his bag had been extinguished so many years before.”

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[Pics taken from my kayak, Brixham and Paignton, Torbay, S.Devon)

ANDREW MICHAEL HURLEY ON FOLK HORROR AT THE GUARDIAN.

Fascinating article by Andrew Michael Hurley that strikes an old iron nail on its head.

Flattered to see ‘The Reddening’ get a mention too.

Thanks Dan Coxon (of This Dreaming Isle for drawing all of my eyes to it).

Read the full article here (and do consider subscribing to The Guardian which has the most generous subscription model).

COUNTDOWN TO THE REDDENING. PUBLISHED OCTOBER 31ST

“With the new ceiling of storm cloud, dusk had surely arrived at midday. Beneath the treetops the light thinned further. She needed a torch and fought a childish panic that the land was cursed in ways she’d never understand.”

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[Pics from Brixham]

COUNTDOWN TO THE REDDENING. PUBLICATION OCTOBER 31ST.

(2 today as I missed yesterday while at a convention)

“Walking from Divilmouth, she’d been struck by how the land changed, the difficulty of moving through it increasing rapidly. Twelve or so miles might have separated the two harbours, though, had someone shown her two sets of photographs of the coastline, one set near Divilmouth and the second set near Brickburgh, and claimed that the two sets had been taken in different countries, she’d have believed them.

Once clear of Divilmouth, Lincoln’s final expedition had taken him, as it now took her, up and down a hilly collar of farmland above a serrated shoreline: a place almost bereft of human habitation for miles beyond a handful of farms and one Land Trust property. Above the sea the continuous range of mountainous mounds might have been the barrows of forgotten gods.

The surface had been wind-flayed into long, coarse wheat-like grass and brittle red heather, roamed by black sheep and small herds of jet ponies. Thorny hedges and black trees divided the turf into a patchwork eiderdown. Valleys emptied streams onto gunmetal sands. Crude faces, roughly hewn from dark volcanic rock, glowered over the empty gouges of coves that required ropes to reach.”

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[Pictures taken in Maidencombe, Labrador Bay and Kingswear]

COUNTDOWN TO THE REDDENING. PUBLISHED OCTOBER 31ST.

“The land corralling Divilmouth’s harbour and its ranks of millionaires’ yachts was made soft and green by great capes of fir trees. The place reminded her of Switzerland, but also the tropics: pines in woods interchanging with lush palms in private gardens. A town built into cliffs and hills festooned with enormous, beautiful houses, arranged in curving rows above the mouth of a broad, glittering estuary: the sands the colour of unbleached sugar, the residents’ yachts moored below their mansions. Boats upright and gleaming like a regiment of royal cavalry, their lances vertical and white. It’s why she’d chosen to stay there.”

[Pics Kingswear & Dartmouth. S. Devon]

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[image error]dening, Adam Nevill, Folk Horror, New novel

COUNTDOWN TO ‘THE REDDENING’. PUBLICATION. OCTOBER 31st.

“Andy looked up, imploringly, at the light situation. Cloud had tarnished the sky metallic, giving the sea an appearance of liquid steel. In one circular portion of the iron cumulus, light splintered to produce the sulfur and mercury of a Turner seascape. Far out at sea, one great shaft of concentrated sunlight struck the water, producing a white-gold disc too blinding to look into.

But definition along the cliff edge was growing vague. Greens, blues and reds were being extracted from the earth. He pictured himself reduced to a tiny figure in a dark aerial photograph, the surface murky with dust.”

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[pics South Hams, from Start Point to East Prawle]

DAY 4. COUNTDOWN TO THE REDDENING. PUBLISHED OCTOBER 31ST.

This should have posted yesterday, but never left the dash, so here it is.

“The cliff-fall was two kilometres east of where he’d launched and where he’d watched the earth re-form into an aerial photo. Cliffs that were a part of ancient South Devon. Most of them forged from dark volcanics and shales, forming a mosaic with the regal purple, the rust and brassy pigments of Devonian slates: rocks minted 400 million years before, when this part of the earth was under a sea positioned south of the equator. His own county had given its name to that era in the earth’s long history: the Devonian, when its rocks were smelted in ancient elemental forges of fire, steam and pressure, raging beneath oceans now extinct.

Seated in his harness, he’d looked to the green water turning milky turquoise in one great stripe of sea. Further out the waters were stained a bitter Atlantic blue, finally turning indigo and sparkling silver, the distant horizon rimmed with white fire.

When he glanced back, the land lost the ramparts of natural obstruction at ground level and appeared flatter. No matter how many times he’d looked down upon this earth from altitude, the sight of how Brickburgh was revealed anew always startled him. A velvet fuzz of grass scarred white by tracks and roads. Trees imitating broccoli. Rocks at the shore lumpen and necrotic. Cloud shadows wafting like ghosts wearing actual sheets. Grey farm buildings imitating the hard Lego bricks that found the arch of his foot and cramped his toes to claws when his son stayed for the weekend.”

[All pics South Devon – Brixham & S.Hams]

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AN EVENING OF GHOST STORIES AT COCKINGTON COURT, TORQUAY.

A hideous apparition (that’s me) will be manifesting at Cockington Court to share some uncanny stories on November 3rd . . .

There will also be snakes, spiders, torchlight, spectres in fancy dress, and things get devoured … There was also a murmur of a pyre and wicker effigy, but I may have dreamed that.

I guess this will only be feasible for those local to S. Devon, but this is a fabulous location set in parkland with a long history. Instant atmosphere.

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DAY 3. COUNTDOWN TO ‘THE REDDENING’. PUBLISHED OCTOBER 31st.

“Shelly couldn’t decide if their campsite possessed a single redeeming feature.

The landscape was all that Greg had promised: it was open, wild, hewn from steep valleys, framed by great vistas of sky and sea, and uninhabited. Though the land must have been more hospitable once and even crowded with trees before deforestation had left it barren. There had been a lot of mining here, a long time ago: Greg had said so. But despite man’s devastations nothing appeared tamed. Here all remained intimidating and was as wild as it had been before, but in a different way to her eye: here was mistreated and feral, not healthily wild.”

[Pics taken in Brixham and South Hams]

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