The chilling horror-suspense novel The Ritual became The Adult Book of the Month at Fantasy Book Review for a good reason. Its British author Adam Nevill (born in England and raised in New Zealand, his earlier horror genre novels are Apartment 16 and Banquet for the Damned) is one of the most brilliant contemporary European dark fiction writers.
Gory Contemporary Psychological Horror - Suspense: The Ritual by Adam Nevill
The setting of The Ritual is a great choice itself: a remote, immense Scandinavian woodland. The protagonists are four friends, once university fellow students, who have grown away from each other during the past years, and they organise a reunion trip to an Arctic forest for the sake of good old times. However, something goes wrong. With a short-cut, they get lost, and in the desolate , Lovecraftian wilderness they find an ancient dwell, with weird symbols and signs, several evidences of strange Pagan rituals that were (perhaps are) held there. Tension and unease appears in the group, and the four men clearly feel the presence of something malignant and unearthly, something that lurks behind them and watches them. However, soon more physical dangers threaten them as well…
The Ritual is decidedly a novel for horror fans, the ones who enjoy being-lost-in-the-haunted -forest dark fictions. It can be compared to disturbing masterpieces like Algernon Blackwood’s The Wendigo and The Willows (the latter was the finest supernatural tale ever written in the history of English literature, according to H. P. Lovecraft himself), Lovecraft’s own horror – dark fantasy short story, The Picture in the House, or Stephen King’psychological horror novel The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. Like all the greatest classic masters of the genre, Adam Nevill knows well that innermost fears can be just as frightening than real events that actually happen.
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