Review: Adam Nevill's "No One Gets Out Alive"

Adam Nevill’s latest fiendish work has reached new heights of terrifying. Famous for his skin-crawl-inducing paranormal horror, which so far has come in various gruesome flavours: Scandinavian pagan folklore, Lovecraftian madness, creepy dolls and Victorian taxidermy, all enough to rob me of any decent sleep, his books always had a classic horror elegance to it - but they are positively cushy compared to the brick-sh**ting real-life horror he’s unleashed on us now.

      Fret not, the paranormal element is still well and truly present. But as I agonised, glued into protagonist Stephanie’s skin, my nails bitten to the quick, flippin' ghosts, unsettling as they were, were the least of my problems. If anything, they pointed to the bigger problem: Knacker McGuire and his psychotic cousin, the token Evil Private Landlord of an unregulated rental market we’ve all had to deal with in our student years at some point (and some of us, beyond), and which, more often than not, is run by deluded psychopaths keen on milking the naivety or desperation of the modern destitute, knowing full well they cannot be beaten by lawyers tenant can’t afford or Small Claims Courts, which are notoriously incapable of enforcing their rulings.

     This book, my dears, is not about charming-albeit-evil Victorian dolls scratching on your bedroom door with ancient, cracked porcelain hands in the dead of night. This one’s Eden Lake meets Silent Hill.

   Let me call it Landlord Horror. The sheer every-day survival terror you will only experience when your options have become severely limited by crippling poverty. OK, maybe the landlords we had to deal with weren’t as bad as Knacker. But what unites the real and this fictional one is that, if you’re as poor as protagonist Stephanie, with an irregular pittance of an income from a job that works you into exhaustion, no security net, scraping by on pennies day by day, with friends and family either too far, too indifferent or too alienated to help, you are completely at the mercy of whoever owns the roof of the house you’re sleeping under. And you better just hope and pray Knacker McGuire isn’t that man.

    Nevill paints the picture of Stephanie’s bleak existence and her helplessness masterfully. She’s so used to encountering dodgy characters that she probably thought she could handle this one. And it’s not that she has much choice. Desperation makes her rush into a rented room agreement. And once Knacker, oscillating between creepy and sleazy and downright antisocial, has his hands on her deposit, she is stuck – without that money her options are hardly more than the streets. Desperation is what makes her rationalise the warning signs until it’s too late. Lack of sleep saps her of energy, because late at night she hears crying and voices in other tenants’ rooms – tenants she only seems to encounter briefly in dimly lit staircases and who don’t seem to want to speak to her.

      In short, it doesn’t take long for her to feel like she is losing her mind, and to learn that Knacker and Fergal are capable of worse things than just making her feel severely uncomfortable.

      And when Knacker’s cousin Fergal – who makes Knacker look like a school boy in comparison -  arrives on the scene, and a dark presence inflicts violence in the rooms around her, things begin to spiral out of control. 

    And the comparison to Silent Hill? You’ll see what I mean when you get there. If you want your cosmic horror element, Knacker and co are just the gateway: it will billow into this before long and will fully fledge in the second half of the book, which will hound you with paranormal terror that is inescapable and won’t stop at anything before it breaks you.

     Again, I’d be a party pooper if I gave the story away, of how bad things get. I don’t see why I should ease the way for you, dear reader, by preparing you. You must suffer the horrors as I have, because, let’s face it, we love it – why else would we be reading this?

     Let me just say this: considering that around the time I started reading this book, I found out I have to move house myself, and reading about the depressing, existential anxiety-inducing familiarity of trying to find a place that is a) not a hovel, b) in my price range (which is virtually impossible in Witneyshire), and c) not run and occupied by a Knacker McGuire, made my stomach churn, and this book seemed to hit all my fear buttons with a hammer. It made me want to clamber for the property ladder just to not have to rent anymore.

    Give Mr Nevill this: he might well be the modern Dickens who opens up the public eye to the need to regulate and restrain private landlords. True, this is a horror novel, but the terror lies in familiarity with exaggerated features.

This here novel definitely comes as a cautionary tale: read the small print of your contract. More so, insist on a contract. And don’t move into the first place on offer. Small Claims Courts cannot fight hell.

P.S. Adam – thanks for giving Waterstones a cheeky cameo! ;)

Sleep-deprivedly yours,

Patty

Doomsday Kids 2: Nester's Mistake

A little while ago I reviewed Karyn Langhorne Folan’s Doomsday Kids, a gripping tale of a group of kids trying to survive in a world destroyed by a nuclear holocaust. I did enjoy it, albeit with the reservation that I was unsure about whether nuclear war, a threat that was very real in the 80s, and continues to be one as long as nuclear weapons exist, makes an appropriate subject for entertainment.

      And part of me still wishes for a debate, a call to arms to responsibility and continued disarmament, if you will, perhaps even a more politicised message as it was in Anton Andreas Guha’s Ende or GudrunPausewang’s Last Children. But maybe that is just my personal reflex after having grown up in the Cold War. And maybe this book would be a fantastic opportunity for book clubs and schools, having none of the inevitable datedness of similar titles. And then, whether a piece of art is merely consumed or properly digested is not within the control of the author – it’s the reader’s job and choice.

        But when I step back, it probably makes sense that a group of terrified children huddling in a bunker and then embarking on a journey to a safe mountain place through nuclear wasteland have simply no time, mind and energy to point the finger and discuss the political intricacies that would have led to nuclear war. They would be stricken by grief about the loss of their families, terrified by a world that had gone from relatively safe to a place in which virtually everything and everyone poses grave danger, from minor cuts and blisters to former longstanding pillars of the community. They’d be choked by fear and panic, overwhelmed by their own inadequacies in survival skills, their tensions aggravated by the remnants of a high school pecking order and juvenile politics.

And that’s what Karyn Folan did just marvellously. Liam’s Promise was a great start to an incredibly gripping and promising series easily up there with, and much more relevant than, The Hunger Games, the Gone series or The Maze Runner.

And Nester’s Mistake, the follow up, is tying up all the loose ends I was missing in the first book, without ever losing suspense, and ending on a nail-biting cliffhanger leading to a third part that can’t come soon enough.

The kids have arrived in the mountain place, but their fight for survival is far from over. I won’t be a spoilsport and give you a summary of what happens – if you have read the first book, you’ll probably be gagging for the rest of it, anyway. There wasn’t anything I didn’t like about it:

All the characters have grown immensely. The teen personalities I remember from the start of the first book, who were typical children grown up in relative affluence, trying to find their place in their high school society, have changed almost beyond recognition – their new harsh life has carved and refined them and added layers and depth. Folan has skilfully used a powerful writer’s tool: knowing and sympathising with what has shaped a person makes you love and root for them, effectively erasing the boundaries between the good and bad guys. While I was tempted to dismiss Amy and Wasserman as the classic high school princess and jock bullies at the start of the first book, my opinion completely changed. I found myself unable to take sides with anyone, which really drew me into the story. There is no true constant hero in this story, heroism or villainy come by moment-to-moment decisions. Amaranth, for instance, the underdog girl I especially liked, made some bad choices in this one, leaving me to wonder if I had misjudged her completely, but goes out on a truly heroic move. And even the dangerously mad neighbour has a moment in the light, making it impossible to truly hate her.

     The other bit that I really liked (for want of a better word) was that Folan caught up on the inevitable radiation sickness, which I found had been on the sidelines in the first book. But then, exposure and the cumulative effects take time, and in book 2 it became a central, well-described enemy. It’s one of the aspects that frighten me most about nuclear war: The blast is just the beginning. Living in a poisoned world in which nothing much will thrive and grow anymore, and which saps you of strength and health, is a pointless exercise at odds with the human instinct for hope and survival at any cost. And yet those kids fight. And you can’t help but fight with them every step along the way.

Simply awesome... while I'm usually not one to advertise e-books, preferring my good old hard copies, I do urge you to give this a try.

Absolutely cannot wait for part 3.

Yours, radiantly

Patty

Our September Children's Book of the Month: The Maze Runner

When I read The Maze Runner by James Dashner a few years ago, I was gripped, and tearing my hair out that it initially didn't seem to find the recognition it deserved. It was similar with The Hunger Games, but sometimes books just need to come into their own.

Surely Hollywood's garishly blinking arrow has helped draw attention to it, too, with the movie being released soon. It's sad that it perhaps needed the Dystopia Rage kickstarter of The Hunger Games, because it's a terrific book in its own right. But the main thing is, it's being read. Hurrah and huzzah! And because we love it, we made it our Children's Book of the Month.

 

The story starts with young Thomas waking up to a lift door cranking open, and a bunch of kids staring at him. He doesn't know how he got there and what happened to him, but he now finds himself at the centre of a humongous stone maze. In the day, there are exits opening, leading out into the maze, and he soon learns that for a long time the strange kids venture out there, trying to find a way out. One sinister thing is that the maze changes overnight, so any progress made in a day becomes redundant. The other is that they have to be back by sunset, because then the gates close, and anyone trapped outside in the maze will be at the mercy of the Grievers... horrific monsters, half animal, half machine.

As if that wasn't enough to deal with, there are also tensions among the kids, as Thomas finds out soon enough...

 

This is the start of an utterly riveting teen dystopia series that lovers of the Gone series by Michael Grant and The Hunger Games by Susanne Collins will utterly enjoy. Mind, while it is classed as Teen literature, it makes more than a cracking read for any adult fan of the genre, too. Have a peek at the first chapter here. Some find it takes a little while to get going, but just a little persistence will bring much reward and make it nigh impossible to extract it from your hand.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our Non-Fiction Book of September: Travels with Epicurus

Little fills us Westerners with so much terror (and consequent denial) as the idea of aging. Our constant pursuit of eternal beauty, energy and health has caused us to see old age as undignified, something to be feared. A shame, really, considering that traditionally in ours and still in many other cultures, our elders were considered a source of wisdom and serenity.

In recent years, a movement called the New Old Age has taken off... and while it surely is commendable to want to remain fit and active into old age, could it be that it is just out of a reaction to that ageist attitude that still prevails, as if one has to prove oneself and justify one's existence past retirement age? Which just goes to show that the original problem is still alive and well.

Klein addresses precisely that when he travelled to the Greek Islands to explore the locals' attitude to aging.

The Huffington Post wrote a fantastic review, which says "Klein returned to the Greek village and philosophers he has visited for decades to discover authentic ways of aging. In his funny and wry account, 'Travels with Epicurus: A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of a Fulfilled Life', he concludes that old age is a privilege to be savored, rather than a disease to be cured or a condition to be denied."

And Marcus Berkmann, author of A Shed of One's Own, writes in the Daily Mail: "Reading this book after a period of overwork and high stress, I was bowled over by its easy charm and hard-won wisdom. I shall be buying it in bulk as presents for my equally overburdened peers, and I suspect a few older people will enjoy it, too."
Read the first chapter here.

Patty

Our Fiction Book of the Month: "All the Light We Cannot See"

Our book of the month, "All the Light We Cannot See" by Anthony Doerr, has already created quite a stir in the U.S.. The Washington Post described it as: "I’m not sure I will read a better novel this year than Anthony ­Doerr’s 'All the Light We Cannot See'. Enthrallingly told, beautifully written and so emotionally plangent that some passages bring tears, it is completely unsentimental — no mean trick when you consider that Doerr’s two protagonists are children who have been engulfed in the horror of World War II."

The Boston Globe equally enthuses, and the L.A. Times loves that "Doerr's novel is ambitious and majestic without bluntness or overdependence on heartbreak — which is not to say it won't jerk those tears right out of your head."

On this side of the pond, reactions have been similar: The Guardian states that "this novel will be a piece of luck for anyone with a long plane journey or beach holiday ahead. It is such a page-turner, entirely absorbing".

There's good reason we heart it so much, see?

If you're still unsure, don't fret: read the opening chapter here or pop in the shop to have a gander.

Toodles,

 

Patty :)