But I Digress | The End of Horror

You just can't win with horror, can you?

Over on The Hat Rack the other day, brave Ser Nathaniel of House Katz reviewed The Ritual by Adam Nevill. So what if it came out six months or so ago? Intelligent criticism is always timely, and Nate's an incredibly intelligent critic; of the sort that makes me anxious about my own bloggery bumbling, in fact.

Anyway, in his typically incisive write-up of The Ritual, he of the Hats found much about the last act of Nevill's newest novel to object to -- as I did in my review for The Speculative Scotsman, way back when. Which criticism led to the following comment, from yours truly: 

I'm coming around to thinking that you really can't win with horror along these lines. Either the author rationalises the creepy weird away, which invariably results in disappointment, or he (or she) cuts the narrative short with a dream or a hanging thread and an invitation extended to one's imagination - as Caitlin R. Kiernan has a habit of doing - and that often rankles, too...

I had no answers to the question I posed then, nor do I now, but the more horror I read - and I've always read a lot of horror - the more this seems to me a real problem... this catch-22 of sorts whereby you either give people the answers they seek, and in doing so undermine the unknowableness at the backbone of the vast majority of horror fiction, or else you refuse to explain the inexplicable, and risk the wrath of readers accustomed to neat little bows on all their stories.

In reply to my comment, Nathaniel had this to say:

I agree that there is a huge problem with endings in horror. Of course, one method's the obvious one - just letting the inevitably triumphing evil actually, you know, triumph. Ligotti, for instance, does that, and I know I would've loved The Ritual if, at the end of those two hundred pages, evil did triumph...

But I'll admit that I'm not everyone, and that most people would no doubt hate that kind of ending in a novel. I can think of one or two horror novels that did end in a satisfactory manner - George R. R. Martin's Fevre Dream, for instance - but I can't think of any of the survivalist, great outdoors type that this is, save for The Terror, where I still felt the ending was by far the weakest part. Perhaps the subgenre can only really work in the short story form, where a darker outcome's okay. That'd be a pity, though, as these books do seem to start so well... 

Don't they, though?

I mean, I can hardly begin to tell you how deeply I adore The Terror by Dan Simmons, for instance - if you ask me it's his best book by an Arctic mile, better even than Hyperion - yet Nathaniel's not wrong: in the final summation, even it fell flat. But how could it have ended any other way? I've read The Terror twice, and I haven't the faintest foggiest.

What disturbs me most about all this is that I feel like I've actually come to expect unsatisfactory endings from the horror fiction I read. Going in, I'm already waiting for it all to go wrong... and that can't be right, can it?

So how do you like yours?

Your horror, I mean. Simple, or subtle? Long, or short? Explained down to the last loose end, or left utterly inexplicable?

Is there any way to wrap up long-form horror fiction in a way that satisfies all comers, do you think? Or is it a genre inescapably burdened by the differing expectations of differing readers?

Or am I just mooning at the moon here?

Book Review | The Ritual by Adam Nevill

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When four old University friends set off into the Scandinavian wilderness of the Arctic Circle, they aim to briefly escape the problems of their lives and reconnect with one another. But when Luke, the only man still single and living a precarious existence, finds he has little left in common with his well-heeled friends, tensions rise.


With limited fitness and experience between them, a shortcut meant to ease their hike turns into a nightmare scenario that could cost them their lives. Lost, hungry, and surrounded by forest untouched for millennia, Luke figures things couldn’t possibly get any worse.


But then they stumble across an old habitation. Ancient artefacts decorate the walls and there are bones scattered upon the dry floors. The residue of old rites and pagan sacrifice for something that still exists in the forest. Something responsible for the bestial presence that follows their every step. And as the four friends stagger in the direction of salvation, they learn that death doesn’t come easy among these ancient trees...

***

If you go down to the woods today, whatever you do, heed this one warning: don't take The Ritual with. It'll scare the sense of adventure right out of you.


Hot on the heels of last year's smash hit horror Apartment 16, rising star Adam Nevill returns to wreak havoc on your dreams once more - and on career-best form, for The Ritual is superb. It is from start to finish a far more ambitious book than its predecessor, for the larger part a substantially more effective one, and wreathed throughout with such wonderfully evocative exposition as to engender an atmosphere equal parts awful and exquisite.


But let's meet the gang.


Our main man, Luke, is in truth a bit of a layabout. Having bounced from job to job back home, and woman to woman - but of course - he looks back on his years at Uni, when he shared a Birmingham bedsit with Hutch and Dom and Phil, as "the best days of his life. Of all their lives, he liked to think." (p.45) But that was lifetime ago, and though he and Hutch have kept in touch, hiking together all their adult lives, Luke fears he's grown apart from Phil and Dom... or else them from him. He's right to be afraid.


One drunken night at a wedding reception, the former flatmates plot to renew their acquaintance. Six months later, they meet together in Sweden, to tramp and camp in the pristine wilderness of the North. All too soon, however, tensions begin to flare, and it becomes apparent that neither Phil nor Dom are fit enough to blaze the trail our dab hands had planned. A short-cut is negotiated, through a forest a ways away from the beaten track. The boys go "off piste," where "there are no trails." (p.9)


Bad move.


Because something is waiting for them in the woods. Something so horrific none of them can even begin to conceive of the harm it must mean. Something "from times before symbols and languages could depict such things that hunted and meant murder." (p.208)


The unremitting wilderness of sub-Arctic Sweden is of course a landscape far removed from the luxury London apartments of Adam Nevill's last effort, and it is a grand conjuration indeed; grand and quite, quite terrifying. Luke and his cronies of old quickly find themselves lost in a world stood still, utterly apart from all we can comprehend, and therein the unknowableness of the night, and the horrors it could hold, come front and centre.


Rather too front and centre, as it happens, for in the last act the evil is exposed and explained, and unmasked, the thing loses much of its darkly sparkling lustre. Come to that, the entire last third of The Ritual marks an abrupt about-turn in tenor and in tone so sustained that it serves to dispel the massing thunderheads of terror and tension Nevill so delicately evokes in the early-going. Without getting all spoilery, the aforementioned evil, as it happens, turns out to be "inevitable, relentless and predictable. Imaginative, he'd give it that much, but soulless." (p.341)


That said, the sense of place Nevill establishes in The Ritual is simply excellent; to a one, his characters are naturalistic, and easy to believe in; and the horror that haunts them, before it is so rudely revealed, is truly a chilling thing. Thus, The Ritual can only come highly recommended. It has its faults - foremost amongst them the profoundly unhelpful compulsion to explain what should by all rights be inexplicable and a few lamentably transparent attempts to instil in the reader a pre-existing sense of foreboding (see p.25) - yet these are familiar Achilles heels in horror, and it is in the final accounting tremendously easy to overlook the selfsame issues the genre's grandmasters still stumble upon in an author with such promise and talent and ambition as England's answer to Stephen King, Adam Nevill.

***

The Ritual
by Adam Nevill

UK Publication: May 2011, Pan


Buy this book from

Amazon.co.uk / The Book Depository

Recommended and Related Reading

Adam Nevill and the Case of the Happy Halloween

So one of the year's horror highlights - though I'd say the pickings have been somewhat slim so far - undoubtedly has to be former pornographer Adam Nevill's Apartment 16. You can read the review entire here.

Now it wasn't an entirely perfect novel, but suffice it to say Adam's time as a night watchman made this superbly creepy luxury London apartment-set narrative one to stick with you long after you've turned that last page.

Needless to say, I'm rather looking forward to the next novel from Mr. Nevill - and what do you know? I just came across an extract of it on the Pan Macmillan page. You should really go read it. It's short and sharp, an ideal bit of whetting. If my little birdies aren't misinforming me, The Ritual is due out in May 2011.

The gent's even composed a bit of flash fiction to help bring in Halloween, hasn't he? That's here. It'll take you all of a minute to get through and you'll be all the readier to poke evil midgets who come begging for candy in the eye - as well you should - once you're done.

What riches!