Adam L.G. Nevill's Blog, page 27

FILM RECS – THEME: PSYCHOTIC EPISODES AND VIGILANTES

‘Revenge’ is an outstanding vigilante revenge fantasy imo, and as for ‘The Rover’ few do psychotic episodes in an arid landscape like the Aussies. I found it hard to look into Guy Pearce’s eyes and he kept up the same death stare for 90 mins … Never, ever, bump his car in a carpark! Not a new film, but as with ‘These Final Hours’, I worry how such good films can appear and disappear so swiftly and without me hearing about them?

Also have a soft spot for ‘What Keeps You Alive’, though, oddly, it uses the same conceit as ‘Revenge’. But I readily immersed myself in each story.

In these times, improbable revenge scenarios in which a variety of shit-heels are taken down hard, can be as soothing as a cup of sweet tea, while cosy on the sofa as the rain patters against the windows. Sometimes, it’s all there is.

All on Prime and all non-supernatural thriller/horror. In fact, let me sort out a video night for you: ‘What Keeps You Alive’ as a warm-up for ‘Revenge’, and then ‘The Rover’ so you can go to bed knowing that the world is fecked and that we’re a terrible species, but, low-life will cop it as well. Best case scenario.

Warning – lots of self-surgery in close-up detail. Have a cushion ready! I wriggled like a serpent.

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BOOK REC’: A CHAPLAIN AT WAR: THE GREAT WAR DIARIES OF KENNETH BEST

I still think the best way to understand war is to read the memoirs, diaries and poems of those who participated. So another recommendation for Great War memoirs is the extraordinary ‘A Chaplain at Gallipoli: The Great War Diaries of Kenneth Best’. Best was a padre who served in Gallipoli and on the Western Front (when he didn’t have to).

I played a tiny part in this War Diary series, published by Simon and Schuster in conjunction with The Imperial War Museum. Employed by Kerri Sharp, the series editor, I did a bit of researching and project managing, which involved working in the IWM archive and assessing diaries donated by the relatives of WW2 servicemen (one, I’ll never forget, came in a shoebox and was made up entirely of scraps of paper that a prisoner of war had smuggled out of occupied Europe in his underwear – he was on the death march from Poland towards Berlin, in which he kept a wounded cousin alive with stolen eggs and Oxo cubes and the help of Italian POW’s, in the snow . . . the story was told on bits of paper the size of till receipts).

Anyway, the extraordinary courage of Kenneth Best, his accounts of the action in the Dardanelles, insights into war, attempts to offer some hope and comfort to men in a burning hell of disease, sniper fire, insufferable insects and heat, as well as the chilling precision of the writing, is not to be missed – as a priest he distinguished himself by defying orders and serving on the front line (very rare). Too easy to think: the diary of a priest, how is that interesting? But it stands up with the greats and is a heartbreaker.

There is a great deal of pathos in his accounts too, and a poignant ending in which he loses his faith (he was an inspiration for M H Mason in my ‘House of Small Shadows’). Also, contains the extraordinary story of the undetected allied retreat from this front – a tactical marvel matching Dunkirk but overlooked.

“5th June 1915

Our poor boys behaved like heroes, but are sadly cut up. No clear orders. Told to make for unidentified objective. They went over trench after trench till they had a mere handful of men left and could get no further. Faced by a mass of Turks, they had to retire, losing nearly everybody . . . Blood, flies and smell – I shall never forget it. As one crawled along the trench, the hands and legs of the dead hanging over the edge would strike one’s face. Here and there a familiar face, cold in death. Heartbreaking work.”

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BOOK REC’: STORM OF STEEL – ERNST JUNGER

For those interested in shockingly candid accounts of The Great War, a couple of weeks back I also read Ernst Jünger’s simply incredible memoir, ‘Storm of Steel’. The first substantial narrative I’ve encountered from the other side too. His experience as a German shock trooper (specialist in storming trenches) is just as extraordinary as that of Graves, Jünger being wounded four times, the last time was a bullet through the chest that finished his war (but he lived to the age of 102).

Extraordinary men, who seemed to express no black hatred of the enemy – Graves even knew he was firing at cousins and uncles as he was half German (Robert Von Graves in fact and the reason he signed up immediately to avoid suspicion).

Perfect time for these works of human courage, endurance, suffering and historical accuracy to be read.

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GOODBYE TO ALL THAT – ROBERT GRAVES

That complete immersion in a book when you’re held fast by a writer’s voice, for hours, doesn’t happen for me as a reader as much as it did when I was younger. But it still happens. This week Robert Graves’s enduringly relevant memoir ‘Goodbye to All That’ transfixed me. It seems to contain everything that matters and makes it matter.

For a time, he lived and wrote close to our home, which was my motivation for reading the book (the timing of reading this book during the Week of Remembrance and Armistice events, though, is my second strange Graves coincidence since the summer).

The great majority of the text concerns his participation in The Great War, aged 19 to 21; a period in which he went to the front three times, receiving a terrible shrapnel wound in one lung the second time out. After this near fatal chest wound, received at The Somme, he was placed amongst the fatal cases at the side of the field hospital and left to die with others whose wounds were deemed fatal.

His family were even notified of his death by wounds by the war office and his commanding officer. An aunt was the first to realise he was alive after happening across his name on a rosta in a military hospital ward, as she visited someone else (when he then realises that his belongings were stolen when wounded, I could have wept). The narrative of his being on a stretcher in a crowded hospital train while having his lungs drained of blood, made me feel shaky. By then, he was 21 and what he’d seen and experienced in three years would defy what most artists could even imagine of an actual hell.

This is one of war poems that gripped me as an undergraduate when I first came across it (he somehow wrote and published three volumes of poems during the war, this one edited by his dear friend Siegfried Sassoon).

A DEAD BOCHE

To you who’d read my songs of War

And only hear of blood and fame,

I’ll say (you’ve heard it said before)

”War’s Hell!” and if you doubt the same,

Today I found in Mametz Wood

A certain cure for lust of blood:

Where, propped against a shattered trunk,

In a great mess of things unclean,

Sat a dead Boche; he scowled and stunk

With clothes and face a sodden green,

Big-bellied, spectacled, crop-haired,

Dribbling black blood from nose and beard.

The experience inspiring this poem is explored at greater length in the memoir and takes on a supernormal quality, set in the most wretched landscape, as Graves tries to find blankets for his troops (who would “have followed him into hell”, and did). The prose in that section is a marvel, a pinnacle of horror.

And yet, despite his and Sassoon’s incredible bravery as officers and frontline soldiers, their loathing of the war and the patriotic public – particularly Sassoon who risked everything by taking a public stand and throwing his military cross into the sea – to me seems to reach the very height of personal courage. I was left feeling that if they were representative of their generation, what mankind lost at the front remains incalculable.

Graves lived an extraordinary life but even by 1929 he counted amongst his friends, T. E. Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia), Thomas Hardy, T. S Eliot, Walter de la Mare, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, George Mallory (with whom he climbed), Vaughan Williams, Lytton Strachey, Arnold Bennet, John Galsworthy, Edith Sitwell, Edmund Gosse, John Masefield – and had met H.G. Wells (who spoke but didn’t listen). They’re all in the book.

Incidentally, his experiences with ghosts are some of the best encounters that I’ve read. There are three in the memoir – he came to think of one haunting as an “event” caused by the instability of time – but his discourse on the supernatural is terrific.

Anyway, I’ll sign off with this quote about how he and Sassoon’s views about the war had changed: “We no longer saw the war as one between trade rivals: its continuance seemed merely a sacrifice of the idealistic younger generation to the stupidity and self-protective alarm of the elder”.

I love the phrase “self-protective alarm”, a quote surely ripe for re-use in our times.

Ultimately, for me, the poets won, because whenever the Great War is remembered, I tend to think of them and I imagine the war through their senses.

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THE FOLIO ANTHOLOGY OF HORROR STORIES – ED’ RAMSEY CAMPBELL

I’ll let you imagine my elation at having a short story included in this volume – ‘The Folio Anthology of Horror Stories’ – edited by Ramsey Campbell. I grew up in houses filled with their distinctive slip-cased editions and still have my Dad’s Folio copy of ‘The Hammer of Witchcraft’.

I’d read at least six of these stories by my mid-teens, so if you’d told a 16 year old Adam that one of his stories would eventually be included in the same collection as those stories, he’d have accused you of divining, falsehoods, conjuring and devilry.

A magical circle has also turned for me, as Ramsey published me as a horror writer for the first time in ‘Gathering the Bones’, back in 2004. My hideous evolution continued from then.

With thanks to Paul Finch for first fishing the story out of me and to Gary Fry for processing and canning it at the plant.

Here’s the full track listing of the Folio collection:

The Fall of the House of Usher (1839)

Edgar Allan Poe

The Yellow Wallpaper (1892)

Charlotte Perkins

Gilman Count Magnus (1904)

M. R. James

The White People (1904)

Arthur Machen

Ancient Lights (1912)

Algernon Blackwood

The Music of Erich Zann (1922)

H. P. Lovecraft

Smoke Ghost (1941)

Fritz Leiber

Brenda (1954)

Margaret St Clair

The Bus (1965)

Shirley Jackson

Again (1981)

Ramsey Campbell

Vastarien (1987)

Thomas Ligotti

Call Home (1991)

Dennis Etchison

1408 (2002)

Stephen King

Flowers of the Sea (2011)

Reggie Oliver

Hippocampus (2015)

Adam Nevill

Book details here

THE WHITE GODDESS AND OTHER SYNCHRONICITIES

Here’s the kind of rambling story that an old man might tell you (as you were politely trying to sit at another table or swap bus seats) . . . Anyway, as a layman I’ve had an interest in ritual and visionary magic for years, it goes with the territory. I’ve created a sense of it in a few books: the first two, ‘Last Days’ and then again in ‘Under a Watchful Eye’. I have never, however, knowingly practised it, though I would have made a good Roman because of my sensitivity to omens, augurs, signs and portents.

Now, I knew that the writer Robert Graves lived in the village of Galmpton, about half a mile from our home, for a period of time in the twentieth Century. The village we border, Agatha Christie used as a setting in several books and the next one along, Galmpton, was once home to Graves. A beautiful place, and between Galmpton and Stoke Gabriel, from where I’ve been entering the Dart in a kayak this summer, you can still feel a strong sense of rural England between the wars and earlier. Anyway, I was excited to discover these literary connections when we arrived four years ago (though I struggled to find any local information on what Graves wrote when living there). I digress …

This summer while reading about paganism in the British Isles, I came across a long section on Graves’s book, ‘The White Goddess’. With the exception of Frazer’s ‘The Golden Bough’, ‘The White Goddess’ was probably the most influential work for modern pagans, and taken seriously by academics and historians as a new interpretation of pre-Christian beliefs and culture – in some ways, a repudiation of the Church that began with the Romantics. However, I now discover that Graves actually wrote ‘The White Goddess’, as well as ‘The Golden Fleece’ and ‘Seven Days in New Crete’ (his literary explorations of paganism), while living in Galmpton during the second world war. So he wrote ‘The White Goddess’ less than a mile from where I sleep … I was elated. His life at Vale House has also been described as ‘chaotic and rather Bohemian’. I liked that too.

Going back another 30 years, my Dad gave me a copy of ‘The White Goddess’ when I was a teenager and said, “You should read this”. I never did, and after a dozen house-moves over the years, in which I gave over half of my book collection to charities, several times, I was certain that I no longer owned the book. But, I suddenly wanted to read it in a way that I hadn’t as a teenager, and made ready to buy a new copy.

However, after reading this essay on the book, as I passed through the conservatory, where my non-fiction books are shelved, I immediately saw the cream and aqua-marine spine of the Faber and Faber copy of ‘The White Goddess’ that my Dad gave me over 30 years ago (did it see me first?).

Somehow, I’d kept the book. It was amongst my poetry collections. But how? I pruned my books so carefully when we moved here and probably gave close to 500 books to charity. I didn’t want to fill our new home with hundreds of books that I would never read again, or probably wouldn’t read (though thousands survived the cull and now line the walls …)

Anyway, I sat down with this old copy of ‘The White Goddess’, on the patio outside my office, bathed in golden sunlight. And it was one of those days we’ve had this year where the very air might have seeped from a poet’s dream, and as I pondered the discovery of where this great book was written, and so close to where I live and sleep, and I marveled at how my old unread copy of ‘The White Goddess’ had refused to be cast away for three decades … a large red butterfly landed on my chest and stayed a while.

Highly unusual, they never land on me. But there it sat, calmly, and just rested. I even spoke to it. I’m holding my old book that was written only a few hundred metres away from where I sat, with this gorgeous, fragile creature resting on my chest like a blood-red carnation, and I felt a sense of well-being and elation that made me giddy. One of those curious episodes of “wholeness” I rarely get now but experienced as a child as often as runny noses.

I could explain the entire episode rationally, but I was left with a sense that this is how real magic works. It’s subtle. How something is planted early in one’s life and then activates much later, during a specific time and in certain circumstances, when you’re finally ready and receptive and in the right place. Blink and miss it.

Oh, where have you all gone? I was just saying . . . The White Goddess . . . and . . . oh, never mind. Has anyone seen my hat?

[That’s his house and my talismanic copy of ‘The White Goddess’, a magically-charged item, I’ll have you know].

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BOOK REC’ – THE LOST COUNTRY, WILLIAM GAY

A startling reminder of why I read so much – ever seeking gems like this novel. I’d pitch it as a blend of McCarthy’s ‘Suttree’ and Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales’. As a writer, to my eye, Gay mastered it all: the poetry, insight, story, comedy and tragedy, the tremendous characters that make you ashamed of humanity but still admire it.

The story behind this book’s discovery is extraordinary too. Gay died in 2012 and weeks before his death, he couldn’t find the next novel he intended for publication – this one, written in the 70s. The manuscript’s notebooks were found in his home, then the manuscript typed by his daughter in the 70s was later discovered in several boxes in the roof-space of the cabin he’d once lived in. The last section of the book was found behind a piece of sheet-rock. The disparate, unnumbered typed sheets, filmed with a rime of dust, were then pieced together painstakingly and cross-referenced with the notebooks, by family and friends (mainly J. M. White who tells this extraordinary story, of a masterpiece that came close to oblivion, in the Dzanc edition).

Gay wasn’t published until his 50s but had been writing prose as magnificent as this from his twenties – beggars belief. As if to pile on the misfortune, his publisher went under shortly after his death. This game deals bad hands but this is one of the worst I’ve come across.

The silver lining is that during the examination, or excavation, of his “papers”, four novels and one more short story collection were found. I assume one of those was ‘Little Sister Death’, and maybe another ‘Stoneburner’ (no UK release so I missed that, his first novel, and the only one I haven’t read), so there should be three more books coming.

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NEW! THE RITUAL AUDIO BOOK FROM TANTOR MEDIA

Tantor Audio have recently produced a smart new audio book of The Ritual for the US market, narrated by Matthew Lloyd Davies.

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There’s an audio CD, MP3 CD and audio download at Amazon.com HERE, or Tantor’s website HERE

KIRK HAMMETT ON ‘THE RITUAL’. ‘HOUSE OF SMALL SHADOWS’ MAKES LINE-UP ‘CONJURING’ LIST

The Ritual has continued to enjoy positive notices online, not least from guitar god and Metallica legend, Kirk Hammett, here . I’m a big Metallica fan and first saw them play in 1986, supported by Anthrax, so to see Kirk Hammett appreciate the film so much was a peak moment for me as a writer.

I often find online lists of horror films useful for identifying films on Netflix or Prime that may have slipped under my radar. I’ve collated a few here that include The Ritual.

The first selection contains spoilers for the films included but a memorable scene from The Ritual was recognised too: here

IGN’s Friday 13th roundup also recommends The Ritual here .

Thrilllist includes The Ritual as one of the scariest films of 2018 so far here

And The Lineup acknowledges the film in the same way here

Beyond the film, it was heart-warming to see House of Small Shadows included here for fans of The Conjuring.

LONDON HORROR CON 2018 CANCELLED

Sadly, London Horrorcon has been cancelled on September 1st and 2nd. Massive apologies to anyone I might have persuaded to go! I’m not sure exactly why the company behind the events has folded, but their demise has seen both the forthcoming Bristol and Birmingham Halloween Horror cons go out too – I had hoped to appear at both of those events.

The conventions were always fascinating events and a terrific way for me to meet readers and horror fanatics nationwide, so it’s disappointing. But I’ll let ya’ll know if anything arises on the live scene to fill the void, or if horrorcon reanimates in new form.

Meanwhile, I’ve amassed a large stock of my novels and I now have the perfect opportunity to broaden what my online store currently offers. Signed copies of my novels and paperback collections will gradually start appearing for sale here. So, if you haven’t had the dubious opportunity to meet my hideous visage in the flesh to get a book signed, they’ll all be in the store soon, should you want a book with my hoof-print upon the full title page.