Few believed Professor Coldwell was in touch with an unseen world—that he could commune with spirits. But in Scotland's oldest university town something has passed from darkness into light. Now, the young are being haunted by night terrors and those who are visited disappear. This is certainly not a place for outsiders, especially at night. So what chance do a rootless musician and burned out explorer have of surviving their entanglement with an ageless supernatural evil and the ruthless cult that worships it? This chilling occult thriller is both an homage to the great age of British ghost stories and a pacy modern tale of diabolism and witchcraft.
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About the Author
Adam L. G. Nevill is the author of nine novels written under a pseudonym.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Contemporary gothic horror novel that's seriously scary!,
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This review is from: Banquet for the Damned (Paperback)
Much of the best in horror fiction comes from writers in the UK, and Adam LG Nevill's novel "Banquet for the Damned" contributes to that distinguished tradition. It's character-driven and suspenseful.
Dante is a young prog-metal guitarist at loose ends professionally and personally. Steadily approaching thirty, he's between bands and between girls, feeling dry creatively - and getting increasingly uncomfortable with his lack of future direction in the industrial city of Birmingham in the English Midlands. Used to having fun and living one day at a time, even he's finding it hard to fight sensations of failure. Enter Eliot Coldwell, professor in the Department of Theology at St. Andrews University in Scotland's oldest university town. Dante's always admired "Banquet for the Damned," a controversial book Coldwell wrote many decades before, and which Dante credits with inspiring and influencing his life. When Coldwell invites him to St. Andrews University to take up a position as his new research assistant, all expenses paid, Dante thinks he's gotten the break of a lifetime. He imagines working under the enigmatic Coldwell will give him the creative boost he needs for a new music project, a concept album based Coldwell's ideas and writings. So, with best friend Tom, he packs up his battered Land Rover and heads to St. Andrews. But things turn out vastly different for Dante. Students at the university are dying in unimaginably horrible ways after suffering terrifying and paralyzing sleep disturbances. Coldwell's career-long involvement in witchcraft and the supernatural have caused him to summon forces far beyond his control. And very quickly, Dante, and a visiting academic, Hart Miller, are fighting for their lives against the vengeful spirit of a long-ago executed witch and her horrifying "familiar," the hideous (and very hungry) Brown Man. Nevill's writing is controlled - descriptive without ever becoming excessive or overwrought. He creates atmosphere very well ("it is a night empty of cloud and as still as space"), and the old university town of St. Andrews provides the perfect setting. In his descriptions of its buildings and architecture, Nevill has a keen eye for grim, stark detail which he uses skillfully in creating dark tone and mood. In every corner of St. Andrews University, the violence and cruelty of the town's witch-burning past weigh heavily on the present. Nevill's characters are convincing as flesh and blood people, with quirks and frailties -- but they are likable. Dante and Miller are imperfect heroes, and this heightens the suspense around their fight against a powerful supernatural evil. Adam LG Nevill has produced a first-rate horror novel, with a plausible and persuasive edge.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Entertaining occult thriller,
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This review is from: Banquet for the Damned (Paperback)
So I have a weakness for occult thrillers. It's a problem that goes way back. I've tried to get help for it...well, ok, so I haven't tried to get help, but I probably should. The point is, I really wanted to love this book, but I ended up just liking it. Don't get me wrong, it's an entertaining page-turner, and I do appreciate that Nevill avoided the ubiquitous vampires, werewolves and other tired gothic standbys that have infected current pop culture. But I just wish he'd had a better editor to rein in some of the sloppiness. Nevill, you see, feels he has to describe everything in maximum detail, so that when a character goes from A to B, he treats us to all the details of everything on the path from A to B. Ends up making the book at least a good 50 pages longer that it had to be, and slows down the paciness. Some originality in the occult details would have been cool too. As it is he lifts most of the occult background straight out of Witchcraft and Black Magic, which just felt a tad lazy - some crazy Latin incantations from an old grimoire would have added a bit of spice.
Still, you could do much worse if you're looking for a fun supernatural romp.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A good scary read,
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This review is from: Banquet for the Damned (Paperback)
I've always thought that the secret to good horror writing lies less in the quality of the portrayal of a story's supernatural elements and more in the effectiveness with which the real world can be evoked; the more accurate those parts of the world with which the reader is familiar, the easier it becomes to accept those deviations and embellishments on reality which would otherwise give rise to disbelief. Credible (and thus more frightening) horror tales build on reality and rely for their effectiveness on the establishment of a sense of trust in the author as an authority on the incredible through their demonstration of empathy with a reader's own experiences.
It is ironic, therefore, that where Adam Nevill's début horror novel "Banquet for the Damned" failed principally for me was not in its horrific supernatural elements but in its piecing together of an altogether unbelievable story setting. The descriptions of St Andrews, on Scotland's east coast of Fife, as a lively student-filled town which is nevertheless something of a back-water, isolated from the world at large, are indeed vivid and compelling; it is easy to see how the town inspired or coloured many elements of this story during the author's time there as a student of creative writing. The author makes good use of the drear moodiness of the north east coast to create a powerful sense of foreboding throughout much of the book, as well as using the town's sense of history and antiquity to suggest at a deep and ancient underlying presence of evil, which has merely been biding its time, waiting for someone to summon it back to power. Other, more central aspects of the story, however, suggest a long gestation period for the book which has resulted in an eclectic and somewhat incongruous juxtaposition of period pieces that, for me at least, had the unfortunate effect of repeatedly throwing the narrative out of kilter. The story is set in and around a contemporary (2008) University of St Andrews, replete with a student body flush with mobile phones, laptops and other standard accoutrements of modern student life. The main protagonist, however, is a failing heavy metal rock musician, who with his struggle to come to terms with a lack of compositional inspiration for his dysfunctional band's second album, his pursuit of a concept album ideal, and a battered old Landrover that he endlessly fills with leaded 4-star petrol (unavailable in the UK since the turn of the millennium) in spite of having almost no money, seems to have fallen right out of the late 1970s or early 80s. In addition, Nevill's descriptions of university staff, their interests and practices are also hard to reconcile with the true nature of today's universities as efficiency-conscious qualifications factories, rather than the somewhat aloof and eccentric centres of learning they once used to be. Again, Nevill seems to be writing of something from the 1970s rather than the modern day. In fact, I think that had the author made a deliberate and conscious effort to seat this story in the 1970s it would have made for a much more convincing and believable tale. But, all of that said... "Banquet for the Damned" nevertheless makes for a gripping and exciting tale of the terrors that the night can hold and the power that nightmares wield over the human psyche. The book is well paced and, apart from a short but oddly lumpy patch in the middle where it seems to lose its way in the mire of depressive alcohol-induced angst on the part of almost all of the characters, remains tightly focused on progressing well to its high-octane and terrifying finale. I would suspect that for most readers, the incongruities of the story will be hardly noticeable, or at least not so bad as to detract from the highly evocative prose which make the book a pleasure to read. Although "pleasure" might be an inappropriate word at times, if you don't happen to take delight in having your flesh made to creep and the spine to tingle. For those looking for a good scary read, this could be just the thing. Personally, I'm still trying to get the smell out of my nose! If you liked this book and are looking for more of the same, Adam Nevill's latest book, "Apartment 16" can also be highly recommended.
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