Adam Nevill - Banquet for the Damned

'From the half-glimpsed manifestations that haunt the entire book to the pure visceral horror of the climax, from the understated menace that lurks under passages of dialogue to the lyrical terror we experience elsewhere, Nevill the novelist displays an impressive range of skills and effects. For example, chapter thirty-seven offers a house possessed by evil, a condition so powerfully characterised that I would class the passage among the great sustained scenes of modern supernatural horror.'

'an impressive piece of work… full of marvellous things.'

'Pregnant with horror both visceral and suggestive, Nevill's novel-length study of mounting dread, malignant forces and personalities whose very flaws invite occult interference stands as one of the few supernatural novels capable of maintaining the atmosphere of menace and authenticity of setting most often successfully invoked in the short story.'

'it's that rare beast: a novel which is by turns readable, well written, compelling and with a great plot. Incredibly accomplished and with a really neat and original monster at the heart of the story. It's a feast worth savouring.'

'With Banquet for the Damned , Adam L G Nevill has written one of the most superbly gripping and creepy books — I'll be watching for more by this hugely talented author.'

'Nevill holds the reader's attention effortlessly and makes us believe the unthinkable, then wraps it up with a show-stopper finale in which all hell literally breaks loose… this is a novel in the tradition of M R James, complete with a chilling atmosphere and ever mounting sense of dread, the occasional bloody set-piece to make the terror even more real, and the subtle use of occult texts and academic papers to provide credence for all that takes place.'

'The Brown Man and his witch followers stealing peaceful sleep and rendering their victims vulnerable to attack worked horrifically well. I'd recommend this book to anyone who enjoys horror. It has a haunting mystery that flows throughout the entire book.'

'The characterisations are well done; the atmosphere and setting (St Andrews, Scotland's oldest university town) are well evoked; the plot runs along at a good, fast pace, with just enough twists and surprises, to a suitably apocalyptic climax.'

' Banquet for the Damned is a first-rate read: one which contains a great deal for the enthusiast of the Jamesian manner to savour, and also offers as much to those who prefer a more obviously contemporary approach to supernatural horror.'

For Clive Nevill

It is a night empty of cloud and as still as space.

Alone, a young man walks across a deserted beach. His eyes are vacant and his mouth is loose. The steps of his unlaced boots in the sand are slow, as if they are taken under duress, or as if he is being led.

Guided away from the jagged skyline of St Andrews town, he moves west toward the Eden Estuary and the Tentsmuir Forest beyond, until the distant streetlights become nothing more than specks winking at his back. As if beckoned, he then moves to the base of the dunes, where the shadows are long and the sand cold.

Suddenly, he stops walking and makes the sound of a man surprised by the touch of a hand from behind, or by the appearance of a figure at his side. He loses balance on his trawling legs, staggers backward and drops to a sitting position.

He dips his head and then raises its weight on a neck made weak by sleep. Reaching his hands out, he fists the sand. It feels wet against his dry palms. Blinking sticky eyelids, he sucks all the air he can into his lungs. Acids churn in his empty stomach and his heart starts to thump. Slowly, he lifts his face to the sky. His eyes widen. A dark but clear canopy of night comes into focus and a fuller awakening hits and spreads throughout his body. Some of the numbness in his walk-warmed muscles goes right away, some of it stays, like in his gums and in his tongue, where the air has come in through parted lips.

Glancing about, he sees small waves from the North Sea lap and fizz against the shoreline. To his left stand the sand dunes, shadowy humps with sparse grasses growing upon their round summits, through which the lights of a hotel flicker yellow and orange in the distant hills.

Confused and alarmed, his mind peels itself from the final wrappings of sleep. Standing up, he struggles to keep his feet and looks down to discover that dressing has been hurried and incomplete. Beneath the padded jacket his naked skin slides against the coat's lining. Under his jeans there is no underwear and his naked toes wiggle inside a big and empty space until they touch smooth hide. No socks.

Shivers prickle his skin, though they are not caused by the midnight chill at sea level, and fear tightens his scrotum. Through the mess of his mind comes the memory of his mother's hands reaching down to collect him from the floor outside of an airing cupboard. She'd often recount the story to guests at Christmas: how her little boy would sleepwalk and be found mumbling about the crows. Relief dares to enter the young man's mind. He's not been sleepwalking for years, but that's all it is. A sleepwalk, so there is no need to panic, it's nothing.

Deep breaths are taken. His heart feels fit to burst. His voice is weak but talking aloud to himself adds something real to this undefined night. 'Walter, relax. Take it easy. Just relax.'

The idea of dressing and walking a mile from the Andrew Melville Hall of Residence to the West Sands is difficult for him to understand. It is such a distance and no one stopped him. A frost sews across his stomach lining at the thought of wandering across all of the roads and passing the deep waters of a high tide to reach these far sands.

Trapped in the dark, somewhere between late evening and the lightening of dawn, he looks for the time. His wrist is bare. But as he raises his hand and swats away a quilted sleeve, desperate to see the luminous digits and hands of his watch, he becomes aware of something on the lapel of his jacket and he begins to sniff. It is perfume. But he has no recollection of the pale arms that touched him there.

Standing still, Walter rewinds his memory back to the last time he was awake. Anxiety about a deadline on his King Lear thesis bustles inside him. That's right: he'd been working late in his room, well past twelve. Did he turn the computer off? He can't remember. But as he worked past midnight, his eyelids grew heavier and his head nodded over the desk until, without choice, his exhausted body took him to bed. Sleep had arrived quickly. And so had the dream.

The dream.

A vague dream where something appeared in his room close to the bed. His recall is hazy, but the experience seems familiar. At first the figure would just watch him. Then it would whisper something he could never understand. Finally, it would reach out and paw, more than touch, the lump of his body under the bedclothes. But was the dream a singular experience, and did it only now seem to have recurred over successive nights? He doesn't know, but stress makes sleep go bad, and there seem to have been so many nightmares lately, in tune, perhaps, with his worrying about the thesis.

'Walter.'

He starts and then turns to the dunes. Nothing to see, nothing moving up there, just the black humps of sand and the spikes of grass outlined against the star-dotted sky.