Book Review: The Ritual by Adam Nevill

I came to this book having already seen the movie (not the ideal way around, I know) which is, if you haven't seen it, fantastic. Liking the movie as much as I do I had high hopes for the book, as they're almost always better than their movie adaptations!

Well, I was not disappointed. Nevill throws us straight into the action from page one and keeps the tension cranked up throughout the entire novel. Sometimes I put a book down because I'm tired, or my stamina for reading just runs out - I want to get up and do other things. It's very rare that I have to put a book down because it's too tense, too horrifying - but this one had me doing just that. The horrors of the friends' journey through the forest are sometimes small and creeping, sometimes large and looming - but they're delivered with a continuous, unrelenting, merciless regularity, nightmare after nightmare piling one on top of the other until you have a monolith of awfulness dwarfing the poor characters struggling through it. There are moments of humour, absurdity and banality, all of which serve to show the characters as mere humans up against something ancient and awful, and not once do they detract from the ever-present dread: dread of being lost, never to find their way out, and dread of something worse than that ...

Nevill is an absolute master of folk horror. If you haven't read this, I highly recommend it. If you haven't seen the movie, I highly recommend that too. If you've enjoyed one but not the other, I recommend enjoying both, because there are enough differences to keep them interesting individually while still retaining the excellent premise and the ever-oppressive sense of threat. Masterful work.

Still hoping to read one where the pagans get to be the good guys though ... ;)