Review: Under a Watchful Eye by Adam Nevill

Under a Watchful Eye
Adam Nevill
Pan Macmillan, 12 January 2017
HB, 416pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy via NetGalley.

Seb Logan is being watched. He just doesn't know by whom.

When the sudden appearance of a dark figure shatters his idyllic coastal life, he soon realises that the murky past he thought he'd left behind has far from forgotten him. What's more unsettling is the strange atmosphere that engulfs him at every sighting, plunging his mind into a terrifying paranoia.

To be a victim without knowing the tormentor. To be despised without knowing the offence caused. To be seen by what nobody else can see. These are the thoughts which plague his every waking moment.

Imprisoned by despair, Seb fears his stalker is not working alone, but rather is involved in a wider conspiracy that threatens everything he has worked for. For there are doors in this world that open into unknown places. Places used by the worst kind of people to achieve their own ends. And once his investigation leads him to stray across the line and into mortal danger, he risks becoming another fatality in a long line of victims...

Under a Watchful Eye is at first sight a return to a more conventional sort of horror than Nevill's last novel, Lost Girl, where the supernatural was backgrounded. In many ways though, Watchful Eye builds on the atmosphere of the previous book, featuring as it does a raddled, stinking and emaciated shaman-type who has purchased dreadful knowledge at a fearful cost, and a murky sect trucking in such knowledge. There's also a seaside location, with the horror made more fearful by its contrast with the clean natural beauty and (in places) daintiness of the South Devon coast.

The book opens in a very conventional, almost MR Jamesian way, with the appearances of that dark figure, seen only in glimpses or from the corner of an eye. The figure seems to be getting closer and to be inducing animation in Seb's surrounding - in a flapping bit of laundry or a sun umbrella - that are suggestive of something with intention (I won't say, "suggestive of something alive").

Soon, Seb begins to relate all this to a former flatmate from his university days, the dishevelled, drug using dropout Ewan Alexander who haunted Seb's earlier life, drawing him into a smelly, tawdry life among bags of rubbish, unwashed clothes and mouldy walls. A student life, perhaps, dialled up to eleven. Alexander has turned up from time to time seeking money or help and despite all of Seb's protestations, clearly speaks to something from his younger days. So when Ewan does turn up it's not a surprise that Alex doesn't immediately shoo him away but listens to the man hauling two stinking binbags full of crazed, mystical scrawlings which he wants turned into a book.

Seb is, it happens, a successful horror author - though clearly one more conventional than Nevill himself as he remarks later in the story that he couldn't have conceived of a plot as weird as what happened to him.

At one level it's a familiar enough kind of story, as the horrific reaches out into the holiday sunshine of  Devon and lays its grimy fingers on Seb, drawing him back to darker places and showing a terrible reality behind the bright days and salt breezes. Ewan Alexander got involved in something truly dangerous and dark and now it seems to be infecting Seb, as he first starts to doubt his sanity then realises he has a much, much worse problem. As he begins to cut himself off from his (admittedly few) human contacts - a girl who seems to fancy him, his agent - other, shadier figures start to take over his life - until finally, a proposition is put to him - a proposition he has no choice but to accept.

By now we've long left behind the Jamesian antiquarian harassed by clean, straightforward monsters and we're into a a fringe world, inspired partly by '60s theories of expanded consciousness, part by '20s charlatans and showmen. All harmless fun and games until someone loses an eye.

Nevill has a real talent for conveying true, gripping malevolence, not least by reflecting it in the seamier corners of the modern world: "A hint of gas blended through raw sewage. The must of ancient dust under floorboards, mingled with what dirty shoes had left on carpets, where they existed. Cat piss despite there being no cat..."

Always the smell of unwashed bodies, that sticky dust - not the wholesome, hallowed dust of ages from a church or manor house but greasy dusty, dust that infects and in its motes, rises to engulf and stick to you. This is the atmosphere that Ewan brings back into Seb's neat, clean modern house. Later in the book, a suggestion is raised that Seb is - in his latest book - working through issues about cleanliness and the body by writing in this vein, I think it's brave of Nevill to plant the seed of that idea in what may be seen as a partly autobiographical book - featuring as it does, a writer (for Pan!) writing a horror book at the same time as investigating another author of fringe horror.

I'm sure Nevill isn't saying here that he's ever been hooked in by a bizarre 60s ere cult. But you do perhaps get a sense, reading this, of how dwelling among imagined horrors - if only for the sake of writing a book - can prey on the mind. I recall Nevill having said of his last but one book, No One Gets Out Alive, that writing and researching it took him to some very dark places indeed. If the essence of SF (and I'd add fantasy and horror to that) is to take a metaphor and make it actual, then perhaps that's what is going on here with the domination of a horror author by the truly evil.

Under a Watchful Eye is a compelling piece of horror, excellently written and hitting that sweet spot (or in the case of this book, perhaps, foetid spot) between having to know what happens next and not daring to look. I haven't said too much about the later parts of the book because Nevill is playing some clever games here too, which only add to the mood and the implied commentary on horror writing. But you might pay attention to the chapter titles...

Review - Lost Girl by Adam Nevill

Adam Nevill
Lost Girl
Pan, 22 October 2015
PB, 448pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an e-copy of this book via NetGalley.

"Lost Girl" is the story of a missing child, and a father. As the world goes to hell, he focusses on his search for her. At any cost, whoever dies, whatever pain he has to suffer, he will find her.

Two years ago, Penny disappeared. She was playing in the garden by herself: her father, who should have been watching her, was upstairs, flirting by email. Is that why he is so driven to trace her, get her back? Is it guilt? Is it an attempt to atone, to flee from the empty life that's left after she was taken? Nevill doesn't quite tell us, preferring instead to communicate the simple fact of the father's drivenness, amplified by the fact that we never learn his name: throughout the book he remains, simply, the father.

This singleminded hunt is heightened because of the background to the novel. It is 2051, and runaway global warming has taken hold. The summers become hotter every year, crops are failing even in relatively buffered Britain, forest fires and droughts sweep the globe and India and Pakistan are on the verge of war over the declining rivers. A mass movement of refugees crosses Europe ("more and more coming in every day in great noisy leviathans of motion and colour and tired faces") and the population of the UK stands at 90 million (or 100, or 120... the Emergency Government isn't sure). Nationalists, jihadists and crime syndicates strut their stuff. Disease sweeps the globe (it's like the Four Horsemen have found a new partner,and enabler in climate change). Nobody has time or attention for one missing four year old. Except the father. Has he the right, we wonder, to pursue his own crusade like this? But if he doesn't who, who will?

It turns out that there are few like-minded souls who are happy to cooperate - or perhaps, one might think, use the father for their own ends, threatening sex offenders and imposing a kind of wild justice. It's a murky area and he'll take any help he can get - from the woman he only ever hears on the phone (except once...) and who he calls Scarlett Johansson, from the man who becomes Gene Hackman. They support the father, arm him and supply information - but can they really control what they've created?

Nevill's two most recent books, No One Gets Out Alive and House of Small Shadows have been unequivocal horror, albeit of a special kind: not so much spooks and spirits as the despair to be found in a dusty, abandoned country house or a rundown inner city terrace full of rustling plastic sheets and sticky, unwashed crockery. Here he maintains the emphasis on the seedy - as the world winds down, the father inhabits a string of decaying B&Bs, living off processed soya and Welsh rum.  For normal people the world is going to rack and ruin. Only the super rich, or the criminal gangs, have any normality left. But the supernatural? The horror? Well, you'll have to decide, and you can call this a near future thriller or SF if you want, but for me, the horror (the horror!) is rather more stark because it is a credible portrait of what might actually happen, not a piece of fantasy. Perhaps we need more horror like this to shock us into action.

So while this book is not quite what I'd come to expect from Nevill, it is, I'd say, quite properly a horror story and the writing is superb (perhaps a little info-dumpy in places, maybe a few too many lists) but haunting, eloquent and deeply troubling: "...a never-ending carousel of flame, black smoke, glass-strewn streets, bodies under tarpaulins, riot shields glittering in sunlight, placards, aerial footage of felled buildings in other countries, churning brown water moving too fast through places where people had once lived, trees bent in half, tents and tents and tents stretching into forever..."

And that's before we even get to the nihilistic criminal cult of King Death, which is rooted in the decay of our civilization and seems to want nothing but darkness and chaos, but also to be a symbol of it. While the climate change is human caused, the book seems to say, it is still assailing our civilization from outside - and we can, with concerted effort, repel it, plan, allocate, rebuild, confront it. But the enemy we can't defeat, because it is internal, is the human will to death, the selfishness, stuff-you-I'm-alright which is at its purest form in the crime syndicates and the gated communities of the rich, hoarding, thieving, fencing out, killing - a microcosm of what went wrong to cause the disaster in the first place, carrying on as normal, learning nothing.

This is a chilling vision of the future. And normally one might gain some relief from a horror story when the book closes and the bad things end, on closing this, my thoughts were rather that they might only be starting.