Last Days

Long-time readers of my blog(s) will know of my epic and eternal quest for good horror content across all mediums. While I’ve found high-quality offerings in the realms of games, movies and short stories, good horror novels elude me; books that seem promising inevitably fall into the familiar issues of over-explaining and neutering their horror elements, with a regularity that makes me think this is an inherent problem with trying to write full-length horror stories.

Things got so bad that I started to give up entirely on the idea of finding good, spooky material on bookshelves. But then, across the internet, a name started to echo. A saviour. An author fit to single-handedly rescue the horror genre. That name: Adam Nevill.

Nevill, an English author, has been a rising star in the horror scene for a while. His first novel, published in 2004, didn’t seem to attract a lot of attention and he didn’t put anything out besides short stories for a while, but starting with 2010’s Apartment 16 his work has been attracting quite a following among both readers and critics (all of them have been nominated for the August Derleth Award For Best Horror Novel, and three of them won). There’s a chance you’re accidentally familiar with him via the movie adaptation of The Ritual, which has been featured on this very blog via a guest post. I didn’t actually like the movie very much, but most of the reasons why are related to its second half, which I understand diverges significantly from the source material so I’m not going to blame that on Nevill.

For my first proper foray into the man’s work we’re looking at 2012’s Last Days, which…*sigh*...starts out really good but then over-explains things and goes off the rails towards the end. 

(You can buy the book from Amazon UK in an omnibus that also includes The Ritual and Apartment 16 for less than six pounds sterling. I don’t normally suggest purchase options like this, but it’s such a better value proposition than buying it separately that I felt I’d be remiss not to direct readers to it).

Like a lot of Nevill’s books, Last Days centers around a schlubby dude in London who’s making ends meet in a not-terribly-fulfilling job and and wrestling with mild depression and general dissatisfaction with life. This time our hero is Kyle Freeman, a documentary filmmaker who once had a promising career making bold guerilla-style features about the mysterious and the horrific (including the events of The Ritual, neatly establishing an Adam Nevill crossover verse), but who is now stuck in a professional, creative and financial rut. A change in fortune seems to present itself when he’s hired by a mysterious benefactor to make a documentary about the Temple Of The Last Days, a Manson-Family-plus-Heaven’s-Gate style cult led by the mysterious Sister Katherine whose story ended in a violent massacre in the 70s. The money on offer is enough to get Kyle out of his current financial predicament, but more importantly the topic gets his creative juices flowing and for the first time in years he starts to dream of putting himself back on the map.

Recruiting his best friend and cameraman Dan, Kyle travels to the Temple’s old haunts in London, France and America to film the locations and interview former members who got out before the massacre. Inevitably, things start getting spooky as Kyle and Dan find creepy humanoid imprints on walls, see weird stuff on their recordings and have disturbing nightmares. It seems they’ve attracted the attention of Sister Katherine’s “friends”: ghost-like beings that members of the cult claim to have been able to summon.

I think I’m predisposed towards liking Last Days due to my love of found footage and mockumentary movies; the book is the closest I’ve ever seen a conventional novel (as opposed to an epistolary story) come to replicating the feel of the format. The book essentially tells two parallel stories--the history of the Temple of The Last Days and Kyle and Dan’s current-day investigation--and for most of the book’s page count they’re both fascinating. If you’re familiar with the history of real-life 20th century cults you’ll spot plenty of points of inspiration, but at the same time the Temple has enough of its own unique identity and set of weird practices and scandals to make it interesting in its own right. Meanwhile, the stuff with Kyle and Dan getting spooked as they poke around the Temple’s old haunts is (going back to the found-footage comparisons) exactly the sort of low-key horror I like, where the dreadful intimation that something is wrong is emphasized more than what the wrong thing actually is.

The story also works as a pretty interesting character study; despite the fact that a lot of his problems are implied to be self-inflicted, Kyle comes off as a likeable enough guy and I found myself hoping that the Temple job would turn out to be the big break he needed even though I knew it probably wouldn’t be. As the spooks intensify and he and Dan are haunted by the friends and plagued by terrifying nightmares of burning pyres under ashen skies, Kyle starts to fall apart emotionally and psychologically and we learn that it’s not the first time this has happened. In fact, in a rare moment of confrontation Dan flat-out tells Kyle that he’s too fragile to handle the sort of work he’s doing. Given these revelations, Kyle’s choice of subject matter starts to feel like an act of deliberate self-destruction, enabled by the only people in his life not being in a position where they can tell him to knock it off.

Because see, Kyle and Dan are best buddies and pals...under normal circumstances. When they’re on the job and the cameras are rolling, Kyle is the director and Dan is his employee and is expected to follow orders. Most of the time this actually works out fine--Dan doesn’t seem to have much of a creative impulse and mildly hero-worships Kyle--but it means that when Kyle is getting them both into something incredibly dangerous, Dan isn’t really able to stand up to him and either steer him in another direction or just turn away and leave.

So we’ve got a very strong story about a troubled soul pursuing forbidden knowledge in a quest that seems destined to doom him and those around him. All good stuff. And then the book totally blows it.

Let’s talk about the friends for a second. Given the limited information we get about them early on, I assumed they were meant to be beings from some ghostly otherworld, and I was pretty content to receive absolutely no further explanation beyond the occasional hints that come via the creepy silhouettes they leave on walls, some of which depict clothes and other personal objects, and the mysterious artifacts that sometimes manifest in areas they’re haunting. Really, I don’t need anything more than that. You don’t need to dive into a big long-winded stupid infodump about how they’re actually the ghosts of people killed in a religious massac--god damn it Adam Nevill.

This happens about two thirds to three quarters of the way through the book, and it killed it for me. I trudged on a bit further before giving up, although apparently I didn’t miss much because I’ve read that the climax goes in a very silly and over the top direction.

So it seems that Adam Nevill hasn’t quite swooped in to save horror novels. Maybe the next one will do better.