Having previously turned his talents to subjects such as the traditional ghost story, the outsider/occult artist, the ancient, unspeakable deities that inhabit the Scandinavian wilderness, notorious cults, puppets and taxidermy, Adam Nevill looks towards a nightmarish near future crippled by global warming and over population in his seventh novel, Lost Girl. Against a backdrop recognisably close to our own, Lost Girl’s protagonist, named only as ‘the father’ tortures sex offenders for information on his kidnapped young daughter, while descending into grief-stricken madness that eventually brings him face to face with the literal embodiment of the deity of those last days, ‘King Death,’ and its nihilistic worshippers. Nevill’s excellently rendered and poetic prose, combined with his distressing premise, makes for compelling reading. Although some might see this novel as a diversion from his usual genre, the theme of horror is as present as ever, perhaps even more so. As an incidental character says to ‘the father’: “The past is unrecoverable. Extinction is incremental. There is no science fiction. Advanced physics, inter-galactic travel, gadgets? An epic fantasy, the lot of it. There is only horror ahead of us now.” As well as receiving recognition as one of the UK’s best horror authors (his last novel No One Gets Out Alive won this year’s August Derleth Award for Best Horror Novel,) Nevill is also a keen devotee of cinematic horror, as evidenced by his regular recommendations on his blog. Here he picks 13 of his favourite films, with emphasis on some of the lesser known entries in the genre.
Click on the images to scroll through the selections
