The Reddening
Our last visit to the wild world of Adam Nevill--where everyone is depressed and from London--involved a sinister and violent cult. Let’s take a return trip via last year’s The Reddening, which also involves a sinister and violent cult!
The book’s story takes a while to get going, with opening chapters that quickly jump across five years and multiple points of view (this is a multi-protagonist affair, which seems unusual for Nevill). During those years, several auspicious things happen in scenic Devon: a paraglider discovers a cave containing a cache of prehistoric bones and artifacts, and several hikers are gruesomely murdered by naked, red-painted people wielding primitive weapons. The former catches the attention of the wider world, especially when it turns out that the bones reveal an exciting millenia-long history of cannibalism and ritual murder.
Our two eventual protagonists are Kat, a reporter who attended the first press conference discussing the cave and found herself profoundly affected by it, and Helene, a woman mourning her younger brother, who committed suicide after an extended period camping in the area prior to the cave’s discovery. Kat is summoned by the man who found the cave and is shocked to find him consumed by nightmares (uncomfortably similar to the ones she’s been having for the last five years) and paranoia, having supposedly witnessed something he shouldn’t have while paragliding and subsequently been threatened into silence by a conspiracy of locals.
Meanwhile, Helene listens to underground recordings her brother made before his death and is unnerved to hear eerie voices, animal sounds and music. These events lead the two women on a collision course with each other, and with a cult that’s been operating in the region for an unfathomably long time--a cult centered around something horrific and supernatural that lives underground.
The interesting thing about The Reddening’s plot is that it is clearly following well-worn horror territory, but still feels extremely original. There’s obviously a wealth of horror material focusing on rural areas hiding sinister pagan cults, but The Reddening reaches way, way further back than vaguely pre-Christian times for its cult’s practices and fleshes out how such an organization would actually function in practice in a way I haven’t seen before. The book’s most obvious point of comparison is probably Lovecraft’s Shadow Over Innsmouth, in that both involve places ensnared by spooky conspiracies with their roots in something ancient and powerful, but instead of a newcomer arriving in town and finding that something Isn’t Quite Right, The Reddening has a long-term resident (at least as far as Kat is concerned) slowly coming to the awful realization that the place she calls home is hiding something sinister. Many of the specific tropes employed here are often seen in stories of good, proper westernerners venturing too far from their familiar world and encountering scary locals who want to hurt them for inexplicable reasons...except instead of being in Foreign Parts, the danger is in the characters’ back yards, among landscapes usually painted as idyllic and serene.
The cult is not an imposition by some alien force or an outside culture; the story drops lots of little hints, via place names and local folklore, that the red people as an organizational entity have existed in the area for a very, very long time; in fact, they might represent an unbroken chain of cultural transmission going back tens of thousands of years, to a time when Britain was mostly covered in ice and mammoths lumbered across Devon. This is a topic that I happen to find pretty fascinating in real life; many scholars over the years have seriously proposed that various myths and legends may be distantly based on events from the very ancient past, and even more excitable academics have speculated on the existence of isolated enclaves of prehistoric cultures surviving into the modern day. These theories are probably all bullshit (and some of them are impossible to prove either way), but they make for tantalizing speculation and Nevill’s decision to incorporate them into a horror story is a neat idea.
This is all in service to some thematic material that I wasn’t entirely on board with. There’s an undercurrent of post-Brexit rage to the story, which primarily comes across in how the inhabitants of the small village that’s the epicenter of the cult are written. Nevill tries to dodge the classist overtones by going out of his way to drive home how the cult leaders are all mega-posh upper class sorts, but his portrayal of small-town and rural people as ugly, gross and barely able to speak English is still uncomfortable.
That quibble aside, you might have gotten the impression that I quite liked The Reddening. Ha ha! Actually no, I ended up dropping out halfway through. While it’s a fascinating idea for a story and can be nail-bitingly tense at times (Nevill shows a particularly strong grasp of the classic horror “Oh noooo, don’t go in theeeere!” sequence), it’s not very well written.
I don’t know what the books separating this one from Last Days are like, but at some point Nevill seems to have decided to go for a more literary style. Like a lot of books that try to use a more literary style, this mostly involves a tidal wave of metaphors and similes, many of them trying so hard to be clever and erudite that they end up just being kind of baffling.
To be fair, the entire book isn’t written like this. In particular, when things are getting more fast-paced or action packed, Nevill dials it back and uses sparser prose. But this aspect of the writing is prevalent enough that it weighs down the whole story.
A bigger flaw is our two protagonists. The fact that neither of them are especially interesting--Kat is yet another one of Nevill’s mildly depressed underachievers, a protagonist template he seems as devoted to as Stephen King is to his alcoholics--is a problem on its own, but it’s compounded by their narrative voices being functionally identical to the point that I frequently forgot which one the POV was following in any given chapter. Glimmers of personality come through in their actual dialogue, but the narration of their thoughts and actions is the same uniform, leaden, slightly overwrought prose as everything else in the book.
The result of this is that I got to a point halfway through where the were both in mortal peril and realized that I didn’t actually care about either of them. That’s usually the nail in the coffin for any horror novel, and it certainly was this time.