From the Banquet’s First Course to the Last Days

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

As some of you will remember, for a long time I have been concerned about literary horror’s long-term survival. It feels to me like there are precious few new authors working in horror (as opposed to the related but ultimately distinct genre of urban fantasy) who can really be described as new leaders of the field. When I heard that Adam Nevill, quite without me being aware of any of his work, had picked up a string of August Derleth awards over the past few years for his work, my ears pricked up; when I read Last Days, his second award winner, I was so enthused that I ended up reaching back in his back catalogue to catch up over the next few months.

And I have to tell you I really like what I see.

Banquet For the Damned

As with so many debut novels, Banquet For the Damned tries to take the “write what you know route” by setting itself in St. Andrews, where Nevill studied. We encounter the town through the eyes of Dante, who along with his womanising best friend Tom have shown up looking for some inspiration. Dante and Tom’s band, Sister Morphine, have hit on hard times – their debut album didn’t get great reviews (I guess in 2004 there wasn’t much room for people trying to make hair metal a thing again considering that the Darkness were sort of already on the scene), their drummer’s quit after finding out about Tom sleeping with the drummer’s partner, and Dante and Tom are both in a creative rut.

As luck would have it, Dante might be on the trail of some inspiration: during his developmental years he was incredibly inspired by the book Banquet For the Damned by Professor Eliot Coldwell, a startlingly unacademic journey into the occult, drug use, mediumship and all sorts of other far-out subjects. Enormously controversial when it came out in the 1950s, it has retained a cult following, and Dante has decided that now is the time for Sister Morphine to tackle his dream subject – an acoustic concept album based around the book. As luck would have it, Eliot has landed a professorship at the Divinity school in St Andrews, and Dante’s been corresponding with him. To Dante’s surprise, Eliot has actually invited him up to help with Eliot’s latest research.

Dante might rethink his plans if he knew about the research of Hart Miller, an American anthropologist who has been researching the issue of “night terrors” around the world. Whilst the scientific consensus believes that night terrors are a mere dream phenomenon, Hart has discovered an awful connection between them and outbreaks of mysterious deaths and accusations of witchcraft. But could a coven of witches really be at work in St Andrews? Could they really be behind the spate of night terrors affecting students who attended Eliot’s paranormal research group earlier in the year – terrors which see them sleepwalking into isolated places where they can be stalked and killed by the witches’ awful deity? And if all this is the case, just what does Eliot want Dante around for?

Some reviewers have taken to describing Nevill as the British answer to Stephen King; if that’s the case, it’s most evident here, in which Nevill indulges in one of King’s bad habits by having slightly too many viewpoint characters. You’ve got Dante, you’ve got Hart, and you’ve got a brace of more minor characters besides, and it’s a long while before all the strands of the story come together. (When Dante and Hart finally meet they actually comment on how it’s kind of a shame they didn’t encounter each other long before.) Part of what makes later works by Nevill like The Ritual or Last Days so strong is how they are rooted in a single viewpoint, which simultaneously means we really get to know the main characters inside out whilst on the other hand the more invested we are in their experience the more real and intense that experience feels.

Apartment 16 also does the “two main viewpoint characters only meet quite late in the book” thing, but it pulls it off much better, since both of their individual stories are quite strong and the book isn’t littered with so many other viewpoint characters as to dilute that. Here, Nevill tries to juggle too many characters; Hart spends an extensive amount of the novel not doing very much (because if he were more productive he’d have solved the problems before he has to team up with Dante to do it), Tom contributes almost nothing to the plot except disappearing in order to motivate Dante to go gunning after the witches, and so on.

In addition, what characterisation we do get tends to be a little shallow. Women in the novel tend to be evil witches, the unfortunate victims thereof, or irritating obstacles to Dante’s investigation. The sole exception to this is Tom’s ex back in Birmingham, who shows up in the last chapter to hug Dante and make him feel better when he is sad. There’s at least one point where Dante one of said obstacles with a really startling level of violence that, if I’m feeling charitable, I could read as a sign that Dante’s going beyond the pale and is doing stuff which Nevill as narrator doesn’t really condone, except everything before and after this seems intended to spin Dante as the hero of this story and deserving of our sympathy and support.

There’s still a lot to like about Banquet For the Damned, mind, including a very original depiction of witchcraft and its effects, and it kept me reading to the end. At the same time, it didn’t hook me like Nevill’s later works did, and there’s some unappealing aspects to Nevill’s writing here which are prominent here which seem to have got better (or just don’t come up) in Nevill’s later works. Worth it if you’re already a fan, but not a book to turn many people into fans, even if Ramsey Campbell liked enough to attach a quote to it.

Apartment 16

About five years passed between Banquet‘s publication and this one coming out, and it’s immediately obvious that Nevill hadn’t been idle during that time; the novel is much more tightly paced and adeptly written, with better characterisation and a more careful selection of viewpoint characters.

With the exception of a couple of bits towards the end, in fact, the novel is told entirely from the point of view of two characters. The first one is Apryl, an American who has come over to London to sort out the affairs of her great aunt Lillian, who came to Britain as a secretary during World War II and married Reginald, a dashing RAF pilot, staying on in the country after his death only a few years after the war’s end. Apryl and her mother are Lillian’s only living relatives, and at first Apryl’s plan is simply to sell off all of Lillian’s valuables, keep anything of sentimental value (and any clothes that fit Apryl and would tie into her enjoyment of period fashions), and dump the rest. The prize sale of the lot has to be Apryl’s home – an apartment in the luxurious Barrington House in fashionable Kensington, which in the ludicrously inflated London property market should sell for a price that will solve Apryl and her mother’s financial worries forever.

However, once Apryl begins to pick through what Lillian has left behind, she finds herself overwhelmingly curious to learn more about the old dear. She is also profoundly disturbed by Lillian’s diaries, which reveal that Lillian had been regularly trying to flee Barrington House and return to America, but was prevented each time by terrifying visions and bouts of illness that increasingly confined her to the vicinity of the House.

It all sounds like the sad, repetitive meanderings of a mind struggling with dementia – except Apryl can’t help wondering about Lillian’s hints that other residents of the building were experiencing similar problems, or that a particular resident was responsible for this and more besides. Could it be that Lillian was once a neighbour of the controversial Felix Hessen – occultist, mystic, magical apprentice of Aleister Crowley, fascist sympathiser and visionary painter, who disappeared in the 1950s? Is it possible that some artifact of Hessen’s remains behind in the building – perhaps even his planned series of paintings portraying the Vortex, a howling dark void of identity-searing nothingness that was central to his homebrewed occult cosmology? And just what bad blood existed between Hessen on the one side and Lillian, Reginald, and their friends on the other?

Meanwhile, our other viewpoint character – Seth – is coming apart at the seams. His art school education has failed to carve out any opportunities for him in London and he has had to resort to renting a miserable little room above a pub (under conditions which are quite probably illegal) and taking a job as the night porter at Barrington House. He’s miserable, is becoming more miserable as a result of working nights and catering to the whims of the rude, cantankerous residents of the House, and if that isn’t bad enough he’s beginning to see and hear things – things that are at first confined behind the locked door of the mysterious Apartment 16, which has remained shut up for some fifty years and which the House staff are under strict orders not to enter, but soon move into his dreams and make his waking life a living nightmare.

On the plus side, though, they’re giving him some really juicy ideas for paintings…

Perhaps the most impressive thing about Apartment 16 in terms of Nevill’s development as a writer is how adeptly he juggles Apryl and Seth’s plotlines. What is particularly impressive is the way that the two characters don’t actually meet until close to the end of the book, but at the same time their stories are still intimately intertwined – Seth being prompted by the dark forces of Apartment 16 to perform some grim errands in part due to Apryl’s investigations, and Apryl responding to the results of Seth’s activities by doubling down on her sleuthing.

In fact, the whole structure of the book is neatly set up to allow for a long, slow, inexorable collision course between the two characters, the pair starting out effectively living in two entirely separate narratives with distinct and different moods and then gradually narrowing the space between them until they finally meet, an encounter which actually couldn’t and shouldn’t have happened earlier in the narrative because it catalyses the endgame.

One advantage that limiting the number of viewpoint characters has is that it each has sufficient spotlight time for Nevill to really distinguish them properly and make them feel like different people with profoundly different ways of seeing and interacting with the world. Seth is incredibly inward-facing, preoccupied with his problems of both a mundane and supernatural nature to such an extent that he doesn’t really show much of an interest in other people save to the extent that they relate to his immediate issues. One thing that Nevill captures with startling accuracy is how miserable it can be to try and find your feet in London when you’re not earning enough to simultaneously pay rent and the bills and have an awful lot of fun and you haven’t established a local network of friends yet and your old university social circles are disrupted or otherwise gone and you could just go back to living with your family in principle but in practice it would feel like a suffocatingly retrograde step and your privileged university education seems to have got you nothing but a huge debt and a sense that you’re better than all this and the very city itself feels like a baleful, dysfunctional system that is out to hollow you out and kill you. I’ve been in a similar place, though not quite as bleak, and Nevill really captures how that overshadows your perception of everything.

Meanwhile, Apryl seems much more interested in people as people, and as a result is able to observe things which would perhaps otherwise elude Seth, or indeed anyone else who doesn’t have her powers of observation. One of the creepier aspects of the investigation is the slow, dawning realisation shared by Apryl and reader alike that more or less everyone who has had a brush with Felix Hessen in the past has ended up somehow damaged, as though it’s bad luck merely to have been associated with him, and indeed his work seems to appeal primarily to damaged misfits. Perhaps the best example of this is when Apryl goes to a meeting of the Friends of Felix Hessen, a sad little club consisting mostly of poorly socialised fans out to promote their personal theories about his work just as much as the work itself, and has to socially navigate this turgid boil of awkward whilst trying getting some useful hints out of one of the few guests who actually met Hessen.

Another satisfying thing about Apryl is that she managed to simultaneously avoid behaving in an outright gullible way for the sake of the plot on the one hand, whilst on the other hand not quite being so genre-savvy that she stops feeling like a real character and ends up a parody. For instance, once she starts having troubled sleep and senses odd presences in Lillian’s apartment, she stops sleeping there and goes to stay in a hotel instead, and when she goes with Seth on a nocturnal expedition into Apartment 16 she leaves her mobile on so that a friend can listen in and intervene if there is trouble.

That friend happens to be Miles, an art historian who wrote the only academically credible work on Felix Hessen that Apryl meets and flirts with in the process of her investigation. (Indeed, he seems to be the only person who knows very much about the subject but isn’t some variety of closeted fascist or obsessive fan, possibly because he approaches Hessen more as a biographical oddity rather than a genuinely enjoyable artist.) He’s a fun supporting character in his own right, because whilst you might mistake him for Apryl’s love interest (and he seems to think he is at points) if you actually look closer at their interactions it’s clear that he is nothing of the sort – there’s several red flags that come up which suggest that whilst he may be a fun holiday lay he doesn’t have long-term potential, and you get the impression that Apryl is fully aware of this.

Nevill also deserves credit for the creation of Felix Hessen himself. Take Francis Bacon’s Silent Hill-inspiring work, add in Austin Osman Spare’s blending of artistic work with proto-Chaos magic, toss in a pinch of Julius Evola (another fascist mystic who was frustrated when the actual fascist authorities in the 1930s World War II kept him at arm’s length) and then wrap the whole package up in a case of cosmic pessimism which would prompt Lovecraft or Ligotti to say “woah, lighten up there buddy”, and you might have a package that roughly conforms to Felix Hessen’s outline.

Nevill, however, is a master at making Hessen feel like a real historical figure distinct from any of the various inspirations that went into him. The Friends of Felix Hessen are a particularly nice touch here; convinced that Hessen’s greatest work has been suppressed by leftists in the art establishment due to his fascist connections (their logic being that people wouldn’t collectively shun a fascist spontaneously without some conspiracy prompting them to do so) whilst at the same time hosting talks from speakers who aren’t quite loud and proud neo-Nazis but give you the impression that if you scratched their surface there’d be a thick layer of fascism underneath. They’re like a mashup of the worst of fandom and the more pathetic side of neo-fascism, all factionalism and silly arguments over irrelevant details and backbiting perpetuated by the sort of people you would expect to end up as a red smear on the pavement if they went back in time and met real 1930s vintage brownshirts.

Apartment 16 is so good that part of me wonders whether the awards for Nevill’s subsequent work aren’t in some way a penance for not showering this one with recognition when it first came out. Yes, Nevill’s award-winners are very, very good indeed (as I am about to outline), but this is outright transcendent.

The Ritual

This is by most measures the novel which put Nevill on the map, picking up his first August Derleth Award along the way. The Ritual throws us its first ghastly image – the carcass of a slaughtered animal slung into the upper branches of a tree – right on page one before stepping back to fill in a little context. Four old friends from Britain – Luke, Hutch, Dom and Phil – are taking a walking holiday in the beautiful Swedish countryside, up close to the Arctic Circle (in summer so as to take advantage of the extra daylight). In the fifteen years or so since they’ve left college, Luke and the others have somewhat grown apart; whilst Hutch, Dom and Phil threw themselves to varying extents into the adult world of stable careers, long-term relationships and, in Dom and Phil’s case, parenthood, Luke kept living a student-like lifestyle of risky choices, taking jobs with no career prospects just to get by, and maintaining a level of personal independence incompatible with long-term commitments.

All this has conspired to make Luke feel like the odd man out in the group, and despite the concessions they have made to allow him to take part in their holiday (more expensive ideas were nixed in favour of the hiking idea precisely because he couldn’t afford them) he can’t shake the feeling that they don’t want him present. The tensions this creates within the group only become more pronounced when it becomes apparent that Dom and Phil aren’t fit enough to handle the demanding route Hutch had planned out. Hutch persuades the group to abandon the established routes and take a quick shortcut through a trackless portion of forest that he reckons will get them on a more direct route back to civilisation.

What Hutch hasn’t counted on is how overgrown the strip is, and how easy it is to go off-course there. Or, for that matter, having to spend the night in an abandoned cabin with some dire pagan effigy sat in a bed upstairs, an effigy which features in awful dreams that haunt all the party members… or Luke’s increasingly erratic behaviour, and Dom and Phil’s declining mobility due to an injured knee and horribly blistered feet respectively… or the discovery of an abandoned village with a dreadful cache underneath its floorboards… or, most of all, the terrifyingly fast hunter in the woods that slings its trophies into the treetops as a means of taunting them.

Predictably, one by one the party is picked off until Luke is the lone survivor, emerging too late to help his friends but hoping to at least get some closure to their families. The story then takes a decidedly unexpected turn when Luke falls into the hands of Blood Frenzy – a black metal band desperate to win infamy that would put the likes of Varg Vikernes or Jon Nödtveidt to shame. They know full well what’s out there in the woods, or at least believe they do, and have occupied the house of its last, ancient worshipper in order to both hide out from the police (they’re in the middle of an energetic killing spree, you see) and to try and evoke it. And what better bait than Luke, seeing how it already has his scent?

The Ritual is divided into two halves; the first, Beneath the Remains, covers the group’s terrible journey through the woods, being picked off one by one by their dire enemy and running into occasional strange suggestions that there used to be an ancient settlement in the area, in which the veneration of this bestial god took place over the course of generations down to comparatively recent history. Like I said, this part is predictable enough; obviously there’s only going to be one last man standing, and it’s equally obvious that it’s going to be Luke.

That said, Nevill does an excellent job of introducing us to Luke and his friends and giving us a sense of them all as fully realised characters, which ensures that we remain invested in what happens to Luke once the novel hits its second phase, South of Heaven, during which Luke is at the mercy of an entirely inhuman beast, a very old lady who may be the last survivor of the beast’s worshippers, and a corpsepaint-sporting trio of sociopaths who clearly don’t have a very good idea of what they are doing but don’t particularly care either, provided that it results in carnage, chaos and notoriety. It’s in this section that the themes teased at in the first half reach their full flowering.

Considering how Luke’s perceptions of the closing segments of the story may be affected by the blood loss and other injuries he’s endured over the course of the novel, it’s hard to put a finger on exactly what the end implies, but there’s definitely a sense that there’s more to this story than just a monster in some woods and some people who used to worship it. Glancing references to small “white people” seem intended as an explicit tip of the hat to Arthur Machen, whose stories of the survival of strange pre-Christian cultures in the wilderness are a clear influence here. Likewise, the beast is never given a name, but it’s difficult not to think of Lovecraftian connotations at points in the story. Of all of Lovecraft’s invented gods, Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young was frequently invoked in Lovecraft’s own writing but never defined; the beast of The Ritual and its diminutive worshippers – the ancestors that the Northern Europeans may prefer to forget – may well be Nevill’s attempt to portray the concept without reference to any of the popular attempts to depict Shub-Niggurath (or, for that matter, without riffing on Lovecraft’s oft-used tentacles-and-slime aesthetic, an approach which made more sense for oceanic entities like Cthulhu and the amphibious Shoggoths and Old Ones than it would for woodland creatures).

The use of Blood Frenzy as antagonists risks stepping over the bounds into outright comic relief, were it not for a number of factors. The band members’ griping about social democrats, Marxists, immigrants, Islam and so on have dire parallels not only with the motivations of Anders Breivik, whose murder spree took place a few months before the novel’s publication; their views also have parallels both in the beliefs of National Socialist politicised sections of the black metal subculture itself, as uncovered in Lords of Chaos by Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind, and in the far-right mystical traditionalism expressed by Moynihan himself and others in the “neofolk” musical scene, as exposed by sources such as the well-researched Who Makes the Nazis? blog.

In conversations between Luke and Blood Frenzy leader “Loki”, Nevill offers up what amounts to a Socratic dialogue between a character in open rebellion against modernity and an individual who, whilst he isn’t sure that modern life is necessarily fulfilling, fair, or just, isn’t out to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Loki’s worldview revolves around his fantasy of a pre-Christian Europe where men would be men, women would be women, and brown people stayed far away and kept their monotheism in the desert with them. He’s the sort of hyper-reactionary who convinces themselves that they were born too late to thrive, even though you rather suspect that he wouldn’t have been the big man he likes to think he’d have been back in History. He talks up Jungian theory and the “return of Wotan” as a revolutionary force within the European psyche, as Moynihan does in Lords of Chaos, whilst Nevill (through Luke) probes with just enough questions and counterpoints to reveal what Blood Frenzy are proposing isn’t the rebirth of some superior warrior spirit, but the destruction of every shred of safety and security people have literally or metaphorically fought for ever since people tried to move beyond a basic animal kingdom might-makes-right setup.

Nevill’s authorial contempt for the Blood Frenzy members sometimes spills over into unnecessary comments. In particular, in any scene involving Surtr, the only woman in the group, he can’t pass up the chance to mention that she’s fat or that her genitals smell strong or both, which is pretty shabby treatment – particularly when you consider that she gets the least character development of any member of the band, mostly because she has no interest in talking to Luke or interacting with him in any way which doesn’t involve torture, murder or mutilation. Beyond that, though, The Ritual is a ripping yarn which cobbles together classic horror motifs into a novel tapestry.

Last Days

Adam Nevill’s second August Derleth Award-winning novel in a row sits in a horror tradition trod by the likes of Ramsey Campbell in The Grin of the Dark and Peter Straub in A Dark Matter, in that all these novels revolve around a protagonist tasked with travelling around piecing together evidence and witness accounts about an incident that happened in the past that proves to have profound implications in the present.

In this case, our protagonist is Kyle, an indie movie director who has successfully helmed a string of cult classic documentaries (some of which seem to be based on the events of past novels by Nevill, in a little easter egg for his fans). A combination of unfavourable contractual terms and bad business decisions in the past means that whilst Kyle’s work has an audience, Kyle himself is in severe debt. The answer to Kyle’s problems seems to lie with Max, a publisher of light breezy self-help books who intends to branch out into filmmaking, with an emphasis on darker, meatier content.

In particular, Max wants Kyle to investigate the Temple of the Last Days, a cult that destroyed itself in a mass murder/suicide in the mid-1970s. Hot on the heels of the Manson Family’s Helter Skelter murder spree, for a time they were the biggest story when it came to murderous death cults until Jim Jones hit the all-time high score in Jonestown, and just like Manson and Jones the Temple – and its leader Sister Katherine – remain potent symbols to this day. However, all the documentaries produced to date on the subject have been utter trash, and the only really insightful book written on the subject was Last Days by journalist Irvine Levine, who focused mostly on the cult’s murderous self-destruction in the Sonoran Desert.

Max wants Kyle to take a broader look, covering the group’s entire history from its early years in London to its middle period on an isolated French farm to its relocation to the desert. If Kyle can pick up any hints of the paranormal or occult, so much the better, but for the most part Max wants Kyle to produce some definitive interviews with the few surviving members of the cult. As Kyle’s investigation progresses, he uncovers a fascinating story, with Sister Katherine emerging from a troubled past to offer acolytes a strange concoction of ripped-off Scientology techniques, hippie mysticism, and her own particular teachings – with otherworldly “friends” or “presences” making themselves increasingly apparent as time went by.

Soon Kyle and his cameraman Dan find themselves stumbling across evidence of the “presences” making an unwelcome comeback, their editor Finger Mouse is asking them whether they’ve had someone else edit strange things into the footage they’ve shot as a prank on him, and interviewees are suggesting that Max himself has his own connections to the Temple in its early days in London as the Last Gathering. When Kyle finally gets the full truth out of Max, it’s apparent that his employer’s intentions go well beyond making a film – but if Kyle doesn’t see it through with him, Sister Katherine’s old “friends” might yet be the end of them both.

Nevill’s research for this book involved looking into the histories of the major names in sinister hippie-era cults: the Process Church of the Final Judgement, the Manson Family, Jim Jones’ People’s Temple. In putting together the Temple of the Last Days, Nevill creates a cult which manages to have its own distinct character whilst at the same time being a bit reminiscent of all of the above – most importantly, the ways in which it’s a bit like the other cults has a lot of overlap in the ways in which they are like each other. The use of intensive confession sessions, psychological abuse, manipulation and control of people’s sex lives, combined with the isolation of the leader from the rest of the group with a tier of feared intermediaries issuing the orders and doing the dirty work (which has the dual effect of making the leader seem sacred and otherworldly whilst at the same time keeping them at a distance from anything their underlings get up to) – all this and more comes directly from the standard operating procedure of 20th Century cults from Scientology onwards.

Where Nevill manages to hit something original is in the paranormal element of the story. The spontaneous appearances of various artifacts, presented as heavenly gifts from otherworldly advisors by Sister Katherine, is highly reminiscent of the “apportions” and psychic letters so prevalent in the story of Helena Blavatsky; more than that, Nevill draws links between the absolute obedience and isolation from the world required of her followers by Sister Katherine and the demands of the more extreme and fringe heretical sects of the Reformation period. (I was cheered but not entirely surprised to see The Pursuit of the Millennium prominently mentioned on Nevill’s reading list.) What’s especially original, though, is the particular manifestations the “friends” of Katherine take as they go about their work, and the psychic after-images they leave behind on the walls and surfaces they manifest through.

Another thing I found refreshing about Nevill’s approach is his take on violence. Violent solutions to problems are a tricky prospect in horror fiction; on the one hand, there’s a long history of them – Van Helsing and pals engage in some decidedly grim excursions in Dracula, for instance – whilst at the same time if violence becomes too reliably effective in dealing with the horrors then your story runs the risk of becoming more like an action movie with jump scares than a horror story. (Consider, for instance, the difference between F.E.A.R. and Condemned.)

Nevill thwarts this here by having Max’s planned assault on the big bad’s stronghold ultimately offer a grim but necessary solution to the phenomena assailing Max and Kyle, whilst at the same time making sure that the raid goes just about as wrong as it can possibly go whilst still achieving at least some of its intended ends (though the book ends on a cliffhanger where not only might our hero be doomed to go to jail forever for his part in what’s happened, but the “friends” may find their way back to our world all over again anyway). The character most comfortable with violence, hired by Max to take him and Kyle into the lion’s den, comes across more as a gun nut special forces wannabe than an actual ex-special forces type; moreover, blindly shooting at the “friends” turns out to be less than useful in the long run, though ultimately their summoner still needs shooting in the face.

On the whole, Nevill does a good job of making natural, ordinary human violence seem horrific in its own right next to supernatural rending and tearing, out of body experiences, possession, and abduction to the grim hellscape of the Kingdom of Fools. The decidedly mundane rape, murder and torture inflicted by the cult on its rank and file members – and, for that matter, the grim plans hatched by Max – are made no less appalling by the supernatural events surrounding them, which is a rare accomplishment in horror.

A Dreamweaver For the 21st Century

I fully intend to keep pushing forward in Nevill’s back catalogue, now that I’ve covered his first four books. He’s been churning them out at the rate of about one a year, and on the basis of the above I fully expect the annual Nevill release to become a cherished part of my reading schedule. Hopefully, he’s got many years of productive writing at this high level of accomplishment ahead of him; his volume of work isn’t quite as extensive as Garth Marenghi’s yet, but if that happened it would be no bad thing.