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
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