🎃 What I Am Reading for Halloween: "The Reddening" by Adam L.G. Neville

I established Adam Nevill a few years ago as my favorite contemporary horror writer, after Ferretbrain led me to some of his earlier novels, The Ritual (about a beast lurking in a remote forest) and Last Days (about a Manson-like cult and what they brought back into the world). I found out earlier this year that he released a new horror novel last Halloween, so I queued it up as my Halloween 2020 denouement.

This book is set in Devon, England, and is about a timeless cult, with prehistoric antecedents, that worships and sacrifices humans to a monster that lives in a massive underground cave system around Devon, England (where Nevill himself lives). In glimpses and close brushes with the endless, grim ocean, the ancient, foreboding, rural landscape, and the massive time covered by the horror in question, the novel has a sense of humanity's cosmic insignificance that can only come from a Lovecraftian bent, though the vibe is more one of "folk horror," as the cover blurb says. In other words, it’s a little more like a campfire story, or a story of lurking horror passed down as, well, a folk tale.

The title refers to the red ochre body paint used by the cult, which is spearheaded by a retired grimdark folk singer from the '70s; calling to mind the Flower Child-originating cult also seen in Last Days. Come to think of it, cults appear in a lot of Nevill books. Speaking of which, I was waiting for references to other books in the Nevill universe, such as the journalist Irvine Levine glimpsed as an author in a few books, but they were not forthcoming. Maybe that is something that he grew out of?

This book was pretty good, and conjured up the late-night reading chills a few times. I especially related to a scene where a character is dumped into the ocean far from shore, and must try to swim in without drowning or freezing; this is one of my nightmares as well as someone who might be mildly thalassophobic. I always recommend the aforementioned two books I started with as the best Nevill books, and also cite No One Gets Out Alive as the book that scared me the most while reading it. But I was happy to have a new offering this Halloween to sacrifice to my own ravening horror beasts, before they skulked back into the fathomless caverns that have always lay beneath the surface.