Last Days

by Adam L.G. Nevill

Blood Frenzy, about three missing British hikers who vanished in the Arctic Circle:

We were here to be cleansed of our pasts, our woes … responsibilities, disappointments … our attachments to anything but her. Everything. Memories even. She wanted everything. All of it. Out of us. Everything that makes us people. Makes us unique. Anything that was a barrier between us and her.

‘Once you’d given up everything, you had to make it work, because there was nothing else for you, nowhere to go. And you were scared of her, but you were kinda scared of losing her too. Shit-scared. All the time.’

After millions of years of evolution, we start stupid cults of celebrity and feed the egos of maniacs until they take our money, fuck us in the arse, and then cut our throats. We should be cutting their throats!’

‘You know, in the airport, coming over, I watched the people around us.’ Kyle shook his head where he lay on the floor, staring at the polystyrene ceiling tiles. ‘So many of them thought they had an audience. They were performing. Because everyone thinks they’re on stage these days. The Show Of Me, mate. Facebook. Twitter. Twitter my arse. Mobile phones? Eh? They’re not for communicating, they’re for broadcasting. Broadcasting The Show Of Me. We are an audience to every shithead with an iPhone. I can’t turn on the telly without some silly bitch with big teeth showing off.’

was the thrust, the constant thrust of other personalities, the desperate need for attention, for their own reality drama, for their own public relations rituals to be seen, heard, remembered. A white noise of self-interest. Sister Katherine was just one endgame in an age of pathology.

Dan was in the fortunate position of not being hunted. Scepticism was a luxury for the unaffected.

‘My point, my dear boys, is that there is something demoniac in human nature that we are unable to stop revering. Unable to stop ourselves serving. This is our greatest tragedy. A tragedy because it is universal, and it is timeless, as all true tragedies are. And we cannot learn from our mistakes and the mistakes of our forefathers.

We seem incapable of being led by any but the monstrous. The malignant narcissist. And there are many willing to take the place of a deposed tyrant, to ape them. And the rest of us, down here, cannot discriminate in the choice of our leaders, even if we have anything resembling a real choice. We cannot lead ourselves rationally or humanely or fairly, so we choose the most unscrupulous and egotistical to lead us. Into one war and one holocaust after another.

‘We worshipped a devil instead. Asked it to lead us. To manipulate and divide us. To disinvest us of our livelihoods, our freedom, our dignity, and even our lives, in the service of itself.’

I believe the vulpine greed of the corporate world is cut from the very same cloth as the tyrant of history. Different worlds, different means, same intention. Empowerment, enrichment, self-interest, at the expense of all but itself. Their strength is their suppression of conscience.

He didn’t know what to scream at first, because there were so many things to scream at.

a woman once, but one that had crowned herself an eternal queen of dust and damnation and the destruction of innocence.

‘Maybe Max was right. We revere the narcissist. Because maybe the biggest stars are those who shed oceans of blood for their immortality. The freaks that consider themselves immortal. Who thought they were Gods. Tyrants for sure. But never Gods.’