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Pagan Rituals, Creepy Old Ladies, and Toxic Relationships

Author: Adam Nevill

Jess McMachen is attempting to move on with her life, to escape her abusive ex-husband, Tony, and to raise her daughter, Izzy, in a safe environment. It’s nearly impossible. Between the demands of a new job – her last chance job – caring for a strange old woman (Flo) who has violent fits, attempting to keep Tony away from their impressionable daughter, and finding a new place to live, Jess is overwhelmed. She’s also having disturbing dreams lately, surrounded as she is by Flo’s decaying house with its dusty relics of ancient paganism. What’s worse is that with nowhere safe to place Izzy, Jess must bring her daughter along on trips to care for Flo, and the vicious old woman has forged a terrifying connection with the little girl. Meanwhile, Jess’ restraining order cannot hold Tony for much longer. He’s out of jail now, and if Jess doesn’t accept his attentions, she and her child could pay the ultimate price.

As with Adam Nevill’s other well-known book, The Ritual, the premise and cover art evoke the spooky, the darkness of a pagan past filled with blood sacrifice and unholy magic, but the delivery is something else entirely. Oscillating between silliness and slowness, the story barely moves, and we spend more time watching banal conversations between unlikable characters than we do in unraveling the meaning of Flo’s past. Likewise, we only have a moment, a small, blurry glimpse into Jess’ past with Tony. It’s hard to tell exactly what happened in this flashback, making it difficult to gauge just how bad Tony is and how much we need to fear for Jess and Izzy. The asinine conversations between Jess and Tony don’t reveal more than an underlying tension that does not belie the ultimate seriousness of the threat.

In the meantime, we have creepy Flo. Flo moves about at night – a physical impossibility according to doctors. She has random episodes where, with no witnesses, she cusses out Jess. She floats, briefly, once. And that is all. Mostly, Flo sits there, stoic and not that important to the story. She’s not even that scary.

Image by pedram ahmadi from Pixabay

And the house – Nerthus House – is touted as a spooky old place with relics of a primeval past, but it’s really just a hoarder’s den, uncomfortable, unclean, and little else. The hints of Flo’s darker side don’t come until far later and by then we are just waiting out the clock, ready for the story to be done. It’s not bad – it’s just nothing special.

The conclusion is a little surprising, a little satisfying, but it is hardly earned and it’s definitely not enough. We have a heck of a lot of questions in the end about who/what Flo is, why she oscillates between hating and helping Jess, etc. The pagan, witchy sacrifice twist is there, but it’s certainly not there enough, and it’s hardly justified. If this were a short story, the dramatic ending would work – but remember, we’ve had an entire novel come before, slowly moving at the pace of an asthmatic snug struggling up a tall tree in a pollen storm. There must be more explanation than all this.

The premise had promise, but don’t let the cover fool you. This isn’t hardcore heavy metal horror. This is a slow story with a few shocking moments in the end, and a whole lot of nothing beforehand. It’s merely ok – a read for a dull day where nothing is going on.

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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