Adam L.G. Nevill's Blog, page 45

ADAM NEVILL GUEST AUTHOR AT DUBLIN GHOST STORY FESTIVAL AUGUST 2016

I’ll be Guest Author at the Dublin Ghost Story Festival this August, courtesy of the magical Brian Showers and the marvelous Swan River Press. I’ve never been to Dublin but have wanted to visit the city since my teens when I discovered James Joyce.

John Connolly is Master of Ceremonies and Robert Lloyd Parry is performing. The event will take place in a Masonic Lodge too. And I like Guinness . . .

https://swanriverpress.wordpress.com/...

The post ADAM NEVILL GUEST AUTHOR AT DUBLIN GHOST STORY FESTIVAL AUGUST 2016 appeared first on Adam LG Nevill.

LOST GIRL: NEW REVIEW

A thoughtful and detailed LOST GIRL review from our man in Sweden: “a premonition of things to come, which gave the novel an even greater impact and resonance long after I had finished it”. My thanks, Jonathan Wood. May Moder never roam south and catch your scent in her leathery nostrils.

https://jonathanswood.wordpress.com/2...

The post LOST GIRL: NEW REVIEW appeared first on Adam LG Nevill.

BEST HORROR OF THE YEAR VOLUME 8 – EDITED BY ELLEN DATLOW

Honoured to have my curious, characterless story, HIPPOCAMPUS, included in Ellen Datlow’s BEST HORROR OF THE YEAR VOLUME 8. The story first appeared in TERROR TALES OF THE OCEAN (Ed Paul Finch). A thrill to fall-in with this unwholesome regiment from the modern horror scene too.

It’s an additional delight to have a story shift uneasily in such fine wrappings. To my taste, this highly collectible Datlow series has consistently produced the best cover artwork in contemporary horror anthologies. There’s always a little bit of Francis Bacon in the designs, and that’s no bad thing.

I also feel like that figure on the cover, for about three days each week.

Here’s the full track listing:

We Are All Monsters Here by Kelley Armstrong

Universal Horror by Stephen Graham Jones

Slaughtered Lamb by Tom Johnstone

In a Cavern, In a Canyon by Laird Barron

Between the Pilings by Steve Rasnic Tem

Snow by Dale Bailey

Indian Giver by Ray Cluley

My Boy Builds Coffins by Gary McMahon

The Woman in the Hill by Tamsyn Muir

Underground Economy by John Langan

The Rooms Are High by Reggie Oliver

All the Day You’ll Have Good Luck by Kate Jonez

Lord of the Sand by Stephen Bacon

Wilderness by Letitia Trent

Fabulous Beasts by Priya Sharma

Descent by Carmen Maria Machado

Hippocampus by Adam Nevill

Black Dog by Neil Gaiman

The 21st Century Shadow by Stephanie M. Wytovich

This Stagnant Breath of Change by Brian Hodge

The post BEST HORROR OF THE YEAR VOLUME 8 – EDITED BY ELLEN DATLOW appeared first on Adam LG Nevill.

ADAM NEVILL INTERVIEW WITH ONE GIANT READ PROJECT – HORROR AND SCIENCE FICTION

Slowly but surely, I drew my plans against complacency. I’ve had a discussion with the One Giant Read science fiction project, on the subject of horror and science fiction. Purely my own take (and assuredly limited), but it got me thinking about what I find stimulating about the combo.

I think they caught me at a dark time too . . .

“To me, space is perhaps the truest horror in our secular world. It’s freezing, constructed out of gases we can’t breathe, and filled with terrifying debris that hurtles at great speeds and assures annihilating impacts. It’s also seemingly endless and gradually fading towards entropy – an environment that is pitched against our continuing existence and a testament to our utter irrelevance. Even the beautiful stars we can see are already dead. And it possesses a size that we can’t really comprehend. Our intelligence is too small for the task. Even if an equation or laboratory model explains it all, I still look at the sky and shudder at its cold beauty.”

http://onegiantread.literatureworks.o...

The post ADAM NEVILL INTERVIEW WITH ONE GIANT READ PROJECT – HORROR AND SCIENCE FICTION appeared first on Adam LG Nevill.

THE RITUAL REVIEWED BY PAUL M. FEENEY

Paul M. Feeney went into the woods . . . we thank him for his time in there, and even if he staggered out naked and crowned with flowers, we’re glad that he reappeared.

https://paulmfeeney.wordpress.com/201...

The post THE RITUAL REVIEWED BY PAUL M. FEENEY appeared first on Adam LG Nevill.

ADAM NEVILL’S LOST GIRL REVIEWED BY HORRORBLOGUK

“An intense, horrific, real, emotional, heart wrenching corker of a story that works so well when written from what is obviously the author’s own fears. The detail and research that has gone into this book is astonishing. This is not a light-hearted read, but that is what makes it magnificent!”

The full review can be found here:

http://www.horrorblog.co.uk/blog/lost...

Delighted to have the book appreciated in this way.

 

The post ADAM NEVILL’S LOST GIRL REVIEWED BY HORRORBLOGUK appeared first on Adam LG Nevill.

Adam Nevill 2015 Reading Highlights

I keep a reading diary and actually managed to read 65 books this year, the most since 2011 when I read each time I had a sleeping baby in my lap, or papoosed inside the sling on my front. That was a rare year in which I read in excess of 100 books. Halcyon days. But my reading highlights for 2015, in the order I read them:

The Two Sams, Glen Hirshberg

Midnight Picnic – Nick Antosca (bizarre footnote – while reading this novel, I realised that he was one of the writers of the Hannibal series that I was watching at the same time)

The Devil in Silver – Victor Lavelle

Carol – Patricia Highsmith

Ana Kai Tangata – Scott Nicolay

Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth – Stephen Jones-Editor (Editor)

Affinity – Sarah Waters

Nights Black Agents – Fritz Leiber (reread)

The House on the Brink – John Gordon

The Blunderer – Patricia Highsmith

The Cry of the Owl – Patricia Highsmith

Black Wings – S.T. Joshi (Editor)

A Fatal Inversion – Barbara Vine

Aickman’s Heirs – Simon Strantzas (Editor)

Lies and Ignorance – Brian Hodge

The Wolf in Winter – John Connolly

The Nameless Dark – Ted E. Grau

Rawblood – Catriona Ward

The Loney – Andrew Michael Hurley

Little Sister Death – William Gay

The Anniversary of Never – Joel Lane

Scar City – Joel Lane

Thirteen Days by Sunset Beach – Ramsey Campbell

Clearly, I fail to keep up with most recent releases.

I reserve special mention for the two Joel Lane collections, and his final collections of fiction. I found them mesmerizing, and he is one of few writers that has always compelled me to pore over every sentence as if I am desperately seeking something . . . I thought I’d finish the two books and feel melancholy. But I actually finished Scar City (which is probably my favourite of all of his collections) feeling assured that I would reread and enjoy all of his books again, and again. He is one of those special writers that always make me want to write.

 

The post Adam Nevill 2015 Reading Highlights appeared first on Adam LG Nevill.

2015 – REFLECTION

Sometimes asleep on my feet, always anticipating an ambush from behind, often out of ammunition and rations, but constantly regrouping my forces with a blast of my horn, my march towards mustering a body of work has continued for another year. I’ve relocated twice in the past four years – from London to Birmingham and from Birmingham to Devon – with a small child in tow. In addition we bought our first family home after an exhausting twelve month search in 2014, for the right place in the right place. I call our home “The House Bought By Horror”. Over two decades of commitment to the most unfashionable, and second most derided, genre of fiction eventually paid dividends that I never expected. The long game is the only game that I have the rule book for.

I have still, however, managed to write and publish HOUSE OF SMALL SHADOWS, NO ONE GETS OUT ALIVE, and LOST GIRL since 2012, so I am giving myself a ration of rum … And, finally, we’re settled by the sea and during our first year in Torbay, Devon, I’ve completed the first draft of another novel (second draft is in-progress). That’s four books and two relocations since 2012, but I can feel it in my back, shoulders and neck, and not least inside my sometimes sluggish, sometimes racing mind. Walking the coastal path and swimming at the local beaches and coves has helped me untie a few of those knots, and, incidentally, I am not planning on moving again. We’re settled and I have a better sense of how to manage my time in 2016, and also a clearer sense of what’s on my plate. I took on too much in 2015, but did manage to write six short stories, a couple of essays and also engaged in a lot of promotional work across six weeks that resulted in a handful of interviews and what felt like weeks spent online …

2015 has had the usual undulation for me as a professional writer, down a few snakes in the bigger, broader board game of which I have no control, but also up more ladders than snakes on balance at year end. But I am delighted to have seen LOST GIRL published and received so favourably. In print, the Guardian, the Financial Times, the Independent, Starburst, SFX and SciFiNow all reviewed the book favourably. Online, a great many bloggers and websites have also found much to like in the book, and continue to do so. I’ll admit to being relieved, surprised, and delighted. From the cover and title to the near future setting, as well as the thriller/vigilante plot and the runaway climate change concept, this book does appear to be very different when placed alongside my previous six novels of supernatural horror. Without any doubt in my mind, though, LOST GIRL is a horror novel, of both natural and supernatural intent and effect. What’s more, the book really mattered to me. They all have done, but LOST GIRL made me feel as if everything was at stake, all of the time, in my imagination – civilization and its values, the world, the human race, the fate of children before such impending and actual chaos. I finished and felt utterly flat, bereft, exhausted. I started to wonder what I could write next that would “matter” as much to me. But on my knees, I began the next book (and on an idea I have carried around since 2003). After a year’s work on the book, I started to like it. By draft two, I know it can stand on its own hind legs amongst its predecessors and whinny like a horrible, sulfurous goat.

Other highlights for me in 2015 included getting my new website, courtesy of the marvellous Helen McQueen (newsletter will be coming soon too), Fantasycon in Nottingham, in which all but one copy of Lost Girl were picked up (and all but four of those at the launch, an event that I set up myself with help from my friends, Paul Meloy and Mathew Riley). And on the final day, to my surprise, NO ONE GETS OUT ALIVE was awarded the August Derleth for Best Horror Novel. I’ve taken that award home three times in four years and I still haven’t quite processed winning the award the first time. Bless the BFS and all who toil beneath its banner. On Saturday evening, the committee also asked me to be a Guest Author in Scarborough 2016. I said, “Me? Are you sure?” Subtext: surely you can find someone better? I’ve been invited to be guest author at another two for 2016, but those details are still being worked out. And yet I don’t expect to ever get over my abject horror at speaking in public at any of them . . .

Another great convention I attended this year was Edge Lit 4 in Derby, where among many good things, I got to hang out with one of my favourite writers, John Connolly – thank you Sarah Pinborough for showing up with him at the pub!

Ellen Datlow published a story of mine in MONSTROUS, Aaron French published another in THE GODS OF H.P. LOVECRAFT, and Paul Finch has just published a third in TERROR TALES OF THE OCEAN. I have another three stories due out in multiple-author anthologies in 2016.

Other than that, four of my books are entangled and enmeshed in four fantastic film and TV production projects that are under embargo so I must be vague … but some of the meetings I’ve had this year … But I never share this stuff publicly and will never believe that anything will ever be adapted until I see it being filmed. I did, however, have one skype (and my first ever skype) with someone so vast, in my estimation, that all I could hear was the rushing of blood inside my head, and my daughter jumping up and down on her bed upstairs shouting “What’s Daddy doing?” Why would I pretend that I am multi-media savvy and have everything under control when I don’t?

And the immortal Slash tweeted about one of my books too!!!!

For 2016, I intend to wrap up one more short story, and my new novel for 2017 somewhere between spring and summer for publication in January 2017. On the prose front, I also hope to announce a surprise in the first half of 2016.

Sincere and heartfelt thanks to all who have read, reviewed and recommended my books this year. You made it a most special year, and you always do. You rock.

 

The post 2015 – REFLECTION appeared first on Adam LG Nevill.

N.O.G.O.A MAKES KIT POWERS NOVEL OF THE YEAR AT GINGER NUTS OF HORROR

On my hind legs and tap dancing with my hooves. NOGOA makes Kit powers novel of the year at Gingernuts.

And my massive thanks goes out to Jim Mcleod and Gingernuts for supporting our horror scene and culture for another year.

“Not a galloping shock for those of you who follow my reviews, I suspect, but it’s got to be Adam Nevill’s No One Gets Out Alive. Again, I don’t have a lot to add to my review, except to say that what makes this novel so exceptional, for me, is that it manages to be both one of the very best haunted house stories I’ve ever read, and also a devastating and quietly furious meditation on the reality of poverty. At the same time. Oh, and it also has what is simply one of the most unexpected and original final acts I have ever read. And it is phenomenally well written. In fact.. ah hell. Read the review, then read the book. And don’t blame me for any lost sleep”



http://www.gingernutsofhorror.com/4/p...

The post N.O.G.O.A MAKES KIT POWERS NOVEL OF THE YEAR AT GINGER NUTS OF HORROR appeared first on Adam LG Nevill.

LOST GIRL MAKES SCIFINOW’S 20 BOOKS YOU SHOULD HAVE READ IN 2015

I’m flattered and delighted to see Lost Girl included in Sci Fi Now’s “20 Books You Should Have Read in 2015″. I dredged my own aquifers, and sifted through an awful lot of gravel and silt, to write the book. It wrung me out. Appreciative recognition like this reminds me of those final, intense rewrites, often lasting until midnight, between March and June this year. They may not have been in vain.

Big thanks to Charlie Oughton for reviewing the book and for putting it forward.

I want them all to matter – don’t we all – but this one was the horror of horrors for me.

http://www.scifinow.co.uk/top-tens/bo...

 

The post LOST GIRL MAKES SCIFINOW’S 20 BOOKS YOU SHOULD HAVE READ IN 2015 appeared first on Adam LG Nevill.