I’ve been a fan of Adam Nevill’s tales since Apartment 16
made me too chicken to switch off the lights at night. Since The Ritual made me
obsessed with Scandinavian folklore and my Germanic heritage demons that still haunted my mother
(there’s a tale there). Since Banquet for the Damned created a discordant homage
of twisted love to the dark beauty of St Andrews and the unfathomable horrors
of a Lovecraftian mind. Since the cracked hands of my inner evil porcelain doll
clapped enthustiastically to the Victorian horrors unfolding in House of Small
Shadows.
So far Nevill has ticked all the boxes of my favourite kinds
of fears. It’s like he is an evil wizard
pulling all my bad dreams out of my head like a rope of threadbare, rotten
knotted handkerchiefs, twirling my demons like Mickey in a Fantasia directed by
James Wan or John Carpenter. Only horror fans might appreciate that particular
addictive (if not slightly masochistic) joy.
The paranormal is Nevill’s specialty, and I imagine it will
always feature to some degree in his tales of doom. But there is a new side to
him, which I can only describe as a modern Dickens. Last year, with the
publication of No One Gets Out Alive, Nevill dealt with a modern horror that
has touched too many of us: unaffordable housing and unstable jobs, leaving us
in a poverty so grinding that we are at the mercy of rogue landlords. Nevill
might have exaggerated it somewhat (although I have met people like Knacker
McGuire, which makes this book all the more terrifying) – but there is
illustration in exaggeration, and Nevill’s recent books have become sharp
magnifying glasses pointed at contemporary societal ills, not instilling an
indescribable horror but stirring up the familiar already there. He’s done
poverty, the housing crisis and unregulated rental markets.
His latest, literally, goes more global. It’s not post-apocalyptic,
it’s bang in the middle of it. Lost Girl is not just what some called a version
of Liam Neeson’s Taken – though if you prefer to read it that way, you
certainly can; it makes a damn fine thriller. But there’s more to it than just
the Leeson meme we’ve all seen. Set in the near future, in a world that is
increasingly crumbling under the effects of climate change in which man has
gone past the point of no return – ecological disasters, food shortages and
water rationing and the resulting mass migrations to escape their doom to not
much more habitable areas – in a Great Britain that is collapsing under the strain
of an apocalyptically hot summer, killing pensioners off like flies, an ever-widening gap between the rich and
poor, where only the rich can afford to get decent food and protection from an
insane organised crime wave so infiltrated in society that the police is as
effective as a cocktail umbrella in a super hurricane of lawlessness… a global horror, a likely horror, a horror
bound to happen if one just spins the yarn further from now, a horror along the
lines of Soylent Green and The Death of Grass, just more brutal and more
likely, where “year after year, decade after decade, always
worsening, always leaving things changed after each crisis. The past is
unrecoverable. Extinction is incremental. There is no science fiction. Advanced
physics, inter-galactic travel, gadgets? An epic fantasy, the lot of it. There
is only horror ahead of us now."
In this setting of despair, a family move to Devon from
Birmingham to escape the constant flooding, to a quiet, still somewhat idyllic
place where self-sufficiency protects them from the worst of the food
shortages. And it is just then when they feel marginally safe, that their
beautiful little daughter gets snatched out of their front garden in a moment
of carelessness, and disappears.
Lost Girl must have been incredibly uncomfortable to write –
I had to think of Stephen King’s discomfort with Pet Sematary. While there are autobiographical elements (a
family moving from Birmingham to Devon with their little daughter), the thought
of getting your toddler daughter kidnapped from right under your care is every
parent’s nightmare. Add to that happening in a world where you can’t expect
help from anyone, the law is impotent, a half-hearted investigation is
abandoned due to lack of manpower, and the forces you are up against are
gigantic. It’s an exploration of the agonies of a father trying to find his
child, not knowing whether she is alive or dead, or what horrors might have
happened to her. It’s about the lengths he goes to, at the peril of everything he
has and is, to save her.
What makes this tale so much better than bland old Taken is how deeply you get submerged into the father’s mind agonising to the brink
of insanity with the grief, loss, worry and uncertainty over his daughter’s
fate, and the horrific fantasies tormenting him. What adds to the intensity is
that he remains unnamed, known only as “the father” through the entire book, making
him akin to an archetype that anyone can identify with, where names don’t
distract from the state of his soul. It gives it the eerie effect that
made McCarthy’s The Road such a haunting read.
The father is not blessed with the skills and coldness of an
ex-CIA man; obsessive research and the help of an anonymous agent aids him in
tracking down the captors, but often he is tormented by his humanity cracking
under the necessity of barbarity to elicit answers from the most callous and
vicious agents of his daughter’s disappearance, people so immersed in a world
of corruption and violence that the father’s attempts to be threatening at
first seem laughable to them. The dilemma the father faces is that in order to
save his daughter from the monsters, he has to become one himself. He has to
risk losing his ability to be a good father and his own sense of self just to get his child back.
The twist at the end I really did not see coming. I will not give much more away other than
that is left open like a wound in which an
infinitesimally small glimmer of hope is
the only balm on offer – but in times of doom one is grateful to at least have
that.
Lost Girl is a relentless study of grief, loss, not just of
a loved one but of humanity in crisis. Nevill skilfully puts it in a setting
that makes this tale both larger than life and just a mere anecdote in the sea
of peril slowly swallowing our planet, a brief zooming in on an individual fate
in a flood of many, a new take on awe-inspiring horror.
The almost prophetic descriptions of a vast refugee crisis
(considering Nevill wrote this book before the current problems hit the papers)
was almost spooky in its timeliness. And the vivid details of his story-weaving
sucks you right out of this world into the one he is master of.
As with all of his books, I advise that you read it at your
own risk. But at the same time, you will be glad you did.
