Disaster strikes quickly and without warning. What should have been a glorious weekend of kayaking and camping, in a secluded beauty spot, is transformed by a scream. The first crisis, initiating a deadly momentum that accelerates as the valley reveals itself to Marcus and his five companions.
They're trespassing on strictly private land. There's only one way out. An escape route closed until the next high tide fills the estuary. In twelve hours' time.
Recreation becomes survival.
Marooned, unable to summon help, harassed by dire and worsening circumstances, the ties that bind the expedition are stretched taut. If they snap, vital cooperation will unravel and the group members' damning secrets will be revealed.
Only the most courageous and committed have any chance against the area's inhabitants. But is any mind strong enough to endure a confrontation with the most hideous revelation of all? An ancient evil that coils beneath the valley's sinister folklore.
A story of life and death in the wilderness.
Monumental is the thirteenth novel from Adam LG Nevill, unlucky for some? Well, thankfully for us readers, here we have another belting tale of dread and horror told with all the flair and imagination we have come to expect from Adam Nevill. But as for the motley band of kayakers in the novel, well, they are going to have a bloody terrible night… And I do mean literally bloody terrible… But I’m getting ahead of myself.
As the fifth book Nevill has published under his own Ritual Limited imprint, we have another fantastic cover from Sam Araya, and once again he has managed to crystallise the novel into a single striking image. The haunting non-human visage that stares balefully back at you from the cover immediately makes you want to pick up the book and find out what the hell you are looking at. However once you get into the novel and discover what exactly is adorning the cover, you realise what a beautiful rendition of the descriptions in the book it is. And indeed after you learn what is masterfully depicted on the cover, you may well find that inhuman face haunting your nightmares.
After ending the world in his previous novel All the Fiends from Hell - a visionary tale of an apocalypse that made Breughel’s paintings of the End Times look like a quaint picnic - you might think that perhaps Adam is getting a bit soft in his old age with a tale of jolly nice folks off for a camp in the picturesque countryside of Devon. However do not be fooled, for while the events recounted in Monumental are on a smaller scale than his preceding novel, there’s no shortage of gruelling horror and dread-inducing imagery here.
The basic plot line is elegantly straightforward, and in many ways, it has the simplicity of an old folk tale. Indeed Monumental is perhaps at its heart a cautionary tale of wandering off into the wilds, for our group of kayakers camping in the Devon countryside will soon discover there’s a good reason why Wyrm Valley is strictly private land, and why the owners don’t want random visitors blundering in. As it is, the trip begins in an inauspicious start - the paddle across the sea to get to the river mouth proves to be highly perilous. But by the time our not-so happy campers realise that they may have made a huge mistake in coming to this particular eerie valley, time and tide are conspiring against them. For as they entered the valley by kayaking in from the sea, they are stranded until the tides change and they can safely paddle out again. However, that means surviving the night in Wyrm Valley… And unforgiving terrain and capricious waterways just being the beginning of the troubles for the party.
And this tidal factor gives the novel a solid structure, with each chapter bearing not a title but a time stamp, ticking down through the dim watches of the night. It is an excellent narrative device, at first charting the timeline of the expedition as the party enters the valley and begins to explore, but it is not long before those chapter timestamps have become grim and terse reminders of just how much longer the characters have to survive. A task that becomes increasingly daunting as their situation takes turn after excruciating turn for the worse, and night seems like it will never end.
Indeed, the natural landscape of the wilds of Devon is very much a character in its own right. At first, the fictional Divilmouth region on the South West coast is beguiling and beautiful, but as we head into Wyrm Valley the countryside becomes increasingly eerie and strange, and ultimately otherworldly and threatening. Much like the old master Algernon Blackwood, Nevill uses the landscape itself to convey a powerful growing sense of uncanny menace. Now here in England in particular, we have always tended to romanticise the countryside, seeing it as a place of green tranquillity, gentle weather and cuddly wildlife. Likewise we tend to view our pre-industrial past through rosy lenses, seeing our ancestors as inhabiting cosy rustic societies, where we lived off the land, and strange stones and crude temples created mystical spaces where they could commune in harmony with nurturing nature.
However as the ill-fated excursion in Monumental reveals, the great outdoors is a frequently unforgiving place, and nature is just green, it’s often red in tooth and claw. Life in the past was similarly harsh and unforgiving, with survival being paid for in blood splashed on old stones. And more often than not, the land lived off our ancestors rather than the other way round. In Monumental, we find that some old practices are perhaps best left in that savage past, that some places are ruined and forgotten for a very good reason, and certain things which haunted and hunted in the ancient countryside should never ever be brought back. Romantic reconstructions and idealistic rewilding can lead to ancient visceral horrors hungrily biting bloody chunks out of the present day.
As I have mentioned in previous reviews, there is often a delicious swerve in a Nevill novel. Now these swerves are not so much surprise plot twists, but more events or revelations that dynamically and thrillingly change your perception of the story. And I am delighted to report that there is a great Nevillian swerve in Monumental. However this time it isn’t rooted in one specific instance - rather I suspect it will come at different points for different readers - very much slowly creeping up on you much like some of the horrors in this book - but a point will come you realise that there are some very subtle connections between the unearthly horrors of Wyrm Valley and certain old legends.
Monumental presents us with a terrifying vision of what cruel terrors lie behind the cosy facade of our old folk tales. And while the theme of let sleeping gods lie certainly signals the influence of HP Lovecraft, there is an older influence here too, the works of Arthur Machen, whose stories frequently reveal a horrifyingly monstrous truth lurking behind the cosy veneer of fable and legend. And should you think that all sounds a tad too cosmic or mystical, do be warned that these old horrors require plenty of blood, and our unfortunate campers intend to go down swinging... It’s not an accident that the opening quote for this novel comes from the great Robert E. Howard, whose weird tales often fused eldritch terrors with a hefty dose of visceral violence.
Furthermore in Monumental, Nevill is very much weaving his very own terrifying mythos. And I was delighted to discover several scattered allusions to his earlier works, references that confirm that this tale is unfolding in the same world in which the events of The Vessel (2022), Cunning Folk (2021), The Reddening (2019), and Under A Watchful Eye (2017) all occurred. And the weird powers and unsettling places of those other novels are part of a wider universe. How far this Divilmouth mythos will be developed remains to be seen, but it is very entertaining for long-time fans to spot these little Easter eggs and to know that there is a Devonian Nevill County infested with a pantheon of ancient thrones and powers, a bedevilled area like Lovecraft’s New England or Ramsey Campbell’s Severn Valley.
In conjuring new terrors that resonate with ancient stories and legends, Monumental sees Adam Nevill once more proving there is more potential in folk horror than just another rehash of The Wicker Man. Much like his previous novels he conjures from the landscape new strange sorceries and malign beings rather than merely sticking a fright wig on the over familiar green man. The horrors of Monumental have a lore of their own, a history that the characters only retrieve glimpses of. And while this bloody new lore clearly echoes aspects of our own folklore it feels unsettling unfamiliar and enigmatically ancient. These new terrors spawned from the ancient landscapes hint of the real reasons we wove tales to scare ourselves away from the dark woods, the blighted moors and the lonely hilltops, and tap into the primal fears of our ancestors that fell powers lurked in these wild spaces, hungering to feast upon us.
As he details in this book’s afterword, Nevill himself is a keen kayaker and the novel was very much inspired by his own excursions in and around Devon. And that shines through in this novel. The descriptions of the journey into Wyrm Valley richly capture the wild beauty of the Devon landscape, firmly giving the novel an authentic sense of place, rooted in real geography rather than some dreamed up version of an idealised countryside. Likewise his knowledge of the practicalities and hazards of kayaking and wild camping similarly ground the unfolding events. As in his earlier works, Nevill has always shown a deft touch at providing details and events that always ground the narrative no matter how far into the supernatural and horrific the story goes. There is always a relatable, recognizable reality governing his stories, where, as in this book, a twisted ankle or a bit of kit failing is as much of a problem as the pale shapes advancing through the dead trees.
Similarly Nevill treats his characters with the same level of reality. While this story may have some wonderful and monstrous otherworldly elements, the party of this most unfortunate expedition are all very real recognisable people. Our lead character Marcus, may well be the main protagonist for the tale, with us mostly seeing events unfold through his eyes, but he is no cookie cutter hero. Rather he is an ordinary guy, with the same physical limits as us, with the same failings and flaws, and harbouring the same doubts, fears and insecurities as we all do. His companions on this paddle to Wyrm Valley equally all have stories of their own, with the novel switching every now and then to see the action from another perspective.
Nevill does not traffic is simple stereotypes, and likewise this group is depicted in a very realistic fashion, with Nevill deft weaving in the kind of rivalries and petty tensions that will emerge in any group of people over time. It’s marvellously well observed; for example we have all met a Nigel at some point, the kind of person who always wants to take charge in a group despite not really being up to the job. Likewise we’ve all met a Julian too, the sort of nebbish that is always around to enable a Nigel. However Nevill’s masterstroke here is how he slowly reveals the causes of all these little tensions in the group, and how despite the party being in increasing dire straits, personal agendas and petty grievances still bubble up to the fore. In the early scenes the group’s interactions did remind me of early Mike Leigh plays, where ostensibly folks are politely getting along, but there’s a prickle tension signalling there is much bubbling under the surface pleasantries. And there is delicious irony in the fact that as the novel progresses you realise that this paddle was always going to end up as the camp from Hell, even if they hadn’t stumbled on the horrors centred on a strange monument in this wild and purposefully private valley.
There is often the idea that in horror fiction one either goes for subtle chills or graphic mayhem. And fear and gore are seen as opposite ends of the horror spectrum, and never the twain shall meet. However one of the joys of an Adam Nevill novel is that he effortlessly delivers both moments of icy creeping dread and red explosions of visceral horror. However In Monumental he is delivering terrors to cover all points in between. We shift smoothly through eerie mystery and psychological suspense, to folk terrors and bloody kinetic body horror, and even reaches transcendent moments of cosmic fright where the landscape morphs into a hellish otherworld that lies just beneath the leaves and soil of this one.
I feel that these oscillations through the spectrum of terror that Nevill orchestrates beautifully in this novel could be termed “Endurance horror”. For Monumental doesn't just deliver a mere physical fight for survival with never-ending numbers of monsters and limited resources, rather this is a series of terrors that drench the characters with unearthly dread, but also plunge them into vivid violence that will test them to their utmost limits. The ancient forces unleashed in Monumental will take them to the edge not only physically, but mentally, emotionally, even spiritually. These endurance horrors are a profound assault on every possible level, redefining a fight for survival as more than a basic physical challenge; it is a battle to continue to exist with a scrap of humanity left and a scramble to retain a tattered shred of sanity.
Monumental is another excellent novel, one that not only has some subtle links to his earlier works, but sees Nevill very much building and solidifying his own personal vision for horror fiction. On one hand Monumental is a great companion to an earlier endurance horror classic from him, The Ritual, but here the gruelling confrontation with dark and bloody paganism is melding with the creeping ethereal terrors found in earlier books such as Under a Watchful Eye. It's a book that has deep connections to the old masters of weird tales, while very definitely taking horror fiction confidently into the 21st century. And I for one, I cannot wait to see what new nests of nightmare Nevill will unearth next!
Monumental is released on the 2nd April from Ritual Limited in hardback, paperback, ebook and audiobook too! Book an excursion to your new nightmares now!
