by Adam Nevill
‘Pig Thing’ was another early story, written at a time of personal and professional despair, and while I was living above an old pub in London in 2000. One evening, I tried to recall a time when I was happy as a child in New Zealand, and this story came out. Not so much horror from a child’s point of view but a story from an omniscient narrator who interprets the experience of children in jeopardy. I think the happy memories about my enchantment in a sub-tropical environment, as a child, became mixed with the oppressive weight of the dark atmosphere that had enfolded me in London, and produced an odd story.
In the first version, the story stops as the two children climb inside the freezer to hide from the pig thing, after having lost an elder brother and both parents to it. I never submitted the story anywhere on spec, but did offer it, years later, to two small presses who asked me for a story. Each of them rejected ‘Pig Thing’. It was too subtle for one, and ‘went nowhere’ for the other. Years later, Danel Olson invited me to write a second story for his Exotic Gothic series. As ‘Pig Thing’ was Gothic in tone and set in New Zealand (the stories in this series could not be set in Great Britain or France) I showed Danel ‘Pig Thing’. He suggested that I write a second part to the story, to make it longer, and I’m glad that I did. The story was published in Exotic Gothic 4, in 2012, but I place it towards the beginning of this collection because the first version was actually written in 2000. It has also been subsequently reprinted by two annual best of horror and fantasy collections.
‘What God Hath Wrought?’ was the first of two stories I’ve written for Conrad Williams, when he has edited multi-author horror collections. This story was written for Gutshot, an anthology with a western theme, published by PS Publishing in 2011. I read a great many westerns as a boy, and loved western films, particularly those that involved the US Army, so I jumped at the chance to be included in Gutshot. As an adult, I’d also become a fan of Cormac McCarthy’s fiction, and had read all of his westerns. It was from the latter that I took most of my inspiration for this story’s atmosphere, while the actual plot and action owed much to my former exposure to westerns. I wanted a collision of pulp fiction with something else more lyrical, to suggest that greater forces and epic histories existed behind the action of the story.
Writing this story also coincided with an enormous research project that I was undertaking for my novel Last Days, in which I studied cults from various eras and cultures, including the Mormon Church. This cult, or movement, has a history perfectly suited to horror, because of its blind faith in the dubiously numinous and supernormal. Its origins contain moments of such spectacular fantasy and obvious confidence trickery that I am still genuinely amazed to see the faith thriving and growing in the modern age. I suppose this story is also my sole contribution to the zombie subgenre that was all the rage in 2010 when I wrote this story.
‘Doll Hands’ was started after midnight as I worked as a nightwatchman in a swanky apartment building in Knightsbridge. This was in the latter half of 1999, or even in 2000. During the early hours of a shift, at this time, I also began recording a series of grotesque prose expressions of isolation and horror that would eventually become my novel Apartment 16.
I often wrote on a second-hand early incarnation of the laptop computer, which used floppy discs. Some of these discs, including the ones containing many of the earliest Apartment 16 fragments, or Down Here with the Rest of Us, as the project was called at the time (without yet forming into a novel), were lost during one of my relocations from one wretched room in London to another wretched room in London. I still dream of a scene that involved a starving cat and a pigeon with one leg, and remember being as inspired as I’d ever been while writing that scene, but it is lost for ever . . . a casualty of war . . . and may have given me the idea for the lost paintings, more like nightmares than actual artefacts, that came to fruition in Apartment 16. But at night, as I’d sit for twelve hours behind a reception desk in that building, before the front entrance, my reflection would appear slightly warped in the glass of the front doors, and my bald white head would seem large and distorted, and would contain a small face above my scrawny shoulders, clad in a grey uniform. That reflection literally mirrored my morbid thoughts and low spirits, and seemed to encapsulate my existence. And the narrator for this story was born.
I finished ‘Doll Hands’ years later in Mayfair, during another porter’s job, at a time in which I’d almost given up any hope of escaping a fate of unskilled, uniformed, low-paid work that could be terribly demoralising. At a real low point, I tried again to express my feelings and impressions within a short story that featured the actual buildings, though in the future, in which the few survivors on the earth were horribly disfigured and had become as much animal and monstrous as they were human. The end of humanity, in effect, with its final industry and purpose being cannibalism. This story also really demonstrates to me how the anthropomorphic horrors of Francis Bacon’s paintings have touched my writing. As an influence, he is probably up there with M. R. James, and Bacon’s effect really ran wild in Apartment 16 too. More than any other artist, in any medium, I think Bacon best distilled the very horror of existence. So this story was one of my own ‘Bacon’ paintings, and another attempt at depicting the childlike voice and perception, because of the strangeness that can be added to the horror; that strangeness amplifies the feeling of horror in the reader but not necessarily the narrator. Is there not instant horror when presented with a recounting of vile behaviour or horrible events by a person for whom such behaviour and events are normal?
Again, it was a story that was knocked back a couple of times by editors who had asked me for a horror story, and perhaps this even disenchanted me about the mileage that this kind of style (beyond my own distorted head) had out there. But the story was rescued from the abyss by Johnny Mains, who was putting together a members-only collection for the British Fantasy Society, entitled The Burning Circus. Johnny was very enthusiastic about the story, and even reprinted it in Salt’s short-lived Best of British Horror series. Ellen Datlow later picked the story up too, for her collection Monstrous, and it has been translated into Russian and German. Moral of the story: sometimes you just have to get your strangest work before the eyes of the right editors.
‘To Forget and Be Forgotten’ was written for Danel Olson’s Exotic Gothic 3, with a setting in Flemish Belgium, one of my favourite places on the planet thus far visited. Antwerp may even be my favourite European city and I’ve visited it even more than Stockholm. But the story, setting and characters are drawn from my own deep well of portering experiences in West London, though less expressionistically in this story than in ‘Doll Hands’.
The scene in which the porter is asked to watch over an elderly heiress for a few minutes, a woman who hasn’t walked in twenty years, is true. It happened to me. And, in the nurse’s absence, the resident did stand up out of her wheelchair and began to walk while shrieking out a woman’s name repeatedly. My presence made her very agitated too, so I did hide behind a wall in the kitchen to stop her getting even more distressed. It was perhaps the longest ten minutes of my life and left me a bit shaky.
Movements inside empty apartments, and strange atmospherics in these old apartment buildings, were also commonplace (footsteps running and walking down empty staircases that you are standing on were not uncommon), as were the incredible ages of the wealthy residents. Rumours and gossip about the residents’ secret histories – which defy belief because such tales never reach the tabloids – were also rife. I actually tried to compose a memoir about being a porter, and wrote an opening ten thousand words. Though all of my stories in the memoir were true, it was rejected by the six literary agencies that I approached with a proposal. Where comment was given, the proposal was rejected for being ‘unrealistic’. One agent claimed it was ‘too sinister and unpleasant’ to publish. What did they want from me?
The final image in the story was suggested to me by Danel Olson. He felt the story needed one final detail.
He’s a finisher.
‘The Ancestors’ was written around 2005, after a request for a horror story based on a cinematic style. I chose Asian horror, as I’d seen a lot of it by then. The themed collection was delayed and delayed and then never happened, but I’d still written my story for it, and then I mothballed it for years. It was first published in what was to be a doomed venture, The British Fantasy Society Yearbook, though a volume did appear in 2009 for society members.
This story featured another of my attempts to evoke horror, as effortlessly and guilelessly as I could, by using a juvenile voice in the first person. It is probably the least revised piece of work that I have written, along with the transcripts of the interviews in Last Days. The Japanese child in my imagination just narrated the story to me and I wrote it down, as did the interviewees in Last Days, and I struggled to find much that I wanted to change after a first draft had bled out in one continuous stream (though that doesn’t mean that these pieces are perfect). The nightmare of a toy with long legs and a horrible face that waited upon a landing for the sleepless to discover it was actually endured by a friend and his father, and in the same house, in which they both worried they were going mad and suffering from hallucinations. I couldn’t forget their story.
‘The Age of Entitlement’ is unusual in this collection, because it doesn’t feature an obvious monster. I wrote this story for Ian Whates’s Dark Currents collection (Newcon Press), published in 2011, and I made sure that my story was more speculative in tone – something that I had rarely tried in this way before.
The location comes from a battlefields tour that I took with my brother in 2010, which we began in Normandy. But the sudden appearance at the window of a building of a stone statue of a woman with her hands over her face relates to an experience I had, with my heavily pregnant wife, in Aberystwyth. The sight of the woman stopped us in our tracks. For several airless seconds, in which I became rigid with fear, I was convinced that I was looking at a ghost. But someone had, for some inexplicable reason, placed a memorial statue in an upstairs window of their home. The world around us suddenly became very Robert Aickman.
Evidence of the colossal but incomprehensible loss of life in the Great War – my brother and I visited dozens of cemeteries in France and Belgium – had a strong effect on me. And a sense of such loss came together with that image of a grieving stone woman that I’d seen at a window in Wales, in the same time frame. Complementing this was a not uncommon experience for me in London, in which I became acquainted with people who were, for their own reasons, concealing the fact that they were very wealthy and had very wealthy parents. One friend even managed to fool me for years. But they were always people whose seemingly carefree approach to life, and confidence, and inability to suffer regret, made me feel neurotic in comparison. So I imagined a Patricia Highsmith Tom Ripley situation, in which a wealthy man had fooled his companion in this way for decades, without realising that his friend was an evolving psychopath. Admiration, I suspect, can easily turn to resentment in the right circumstances, and even violent murder in some cases. ‘The Age of Entitlement’ is a class rage, quiet apocalypse, psychopath story. I’ve always liked it and was grateful that a publisher whom I’d never considered writing for encouraged me to be more speculative with a short horror story.
‘Florrie’ is the second of three stories that I have written over the years for Jon Oliver’s horror and weird fiction collections, published by Solaris. It’s also my favourite of the three. It’s a rumination about age, about becoming sensitive both to age in other people and to the evidence of the past within the buildings that you occupy. As a man who has lived in many old buildings and rooms, poorly or improperly decorated, that are like archaeological digs to a lay social historian, I’ve been peculiarly sensitive to suggestions of who has filled these spaces before me. In my room above the pub in London, a resident (or was that an inmate?) who had lived in a single room within the building for 25 years casually mentioned to me that a sex offender had been arrested in my room (and caught red-handed), and that the room had also been the scene of a long period of explosive domestic violence (I was never able to scrub the dried black blood off the radiator – it had adhered to the metal and hardened like resin). Each of those true horrors made it into my novel Apartment 16.
A touching tale from my own family also made it into this story. The kitchen in my grandparents’ house was being renovated by my sister and brother-in-law, and once the cabinets were removed it was discovered that my grandparents had written their names on the wall, alongside a date, in pencil, to commemorate the time when the cabinets were first fixed there. It was a simple elegy to their beginnings in that home, and it was a detail that I wanted to include within this story, as well as other details that I have observed in the old houses I have lived in or just passed through. I often imagine that the past still exists in a close and not always completely intangible form, though as a mostly unseen presence and more strongly in certain places. Perhaps it’s not only my imagination.
Publication History
‘Where Angels Come In’ originally appeared in Poe’s Progeny, edited by Gary Fry (Gray Friar, 2005).
‘The Original Occupant’ originally appeared in Bernie Herrmann’s Manic Sextet (Gray Friar, 2005).
‘Mother’s Milk’ originally appeared in Gathering the Bones, edited by Jack Dann, Ramsey Campbell and Dennis Etchison (Voyager, Harper Collins, 2003).
‘Yellow Teeth’ originally appeared in British Invasion, edited by Christopher Golden, Tim Lebbon and James A. Moore (Cemetery Dance, 2008).
‘Pig Thing’ originally appeared in Exotic Gothic 4, edited by Danel Olson (PS Publishing, 2012).
‘What God Hath Wrought?’ originally appeared in Gutshot, edited by Conrad Williams (PS Publishing, 2011).
‘Doll Hands’ originally appeared in The Burning Circus, edited by Johnny Mains (British Fantasy Society, 2013).
‘To Forget and Be Forgotten’ originally appeared in Exotic Gothic 3, edited by Danel Olson (Ash Tree Press, 2009).
‘The Ancestors’ originally appeared in The British Fantasy Society Yearbook 2009 (British Fantasy Society, 2009).
‘The Age of Entitlement’ originally appeared in Dark Currents, edited by Ian Whates (NewCon Press 2012).
‘Florrie’ originally appeared in House of Fear, edited by Jonathan Oliver (Solaris, 2011).
Acknowledgements
A very special acknowledgement goes out to the late James Marriott, to John Coulthard and Ramsey Campbell, who got the ball rolling for my short fiction many years ago. My gratitude extends to all of the other editors who often prised these stories out of me, and had the faith in the first place to want a story from me for their collections: Gary Fry, Christopher Golden, Tim Lebbon, James A. Moore, Danel Olson, Conrad Williams, Johnny Mains, Guy Adams (who requested a story for the BFS 2009 Yearbook, though no editor’s name appears on the publication), Ian Whates, Jonathan Oliver, Stephen Jones, Ellen Datlow, Steve Haynes, Victor Blázquez, Dan Coxon, John Joseph Adams, Adriana Diaz-Enciso. I must also acknowledge the persuasive powers of Jen Kitses, who talked me into workshopping ‘Mother’s Milk’ in a creative writing class in 1997. Thanks also to my father, Clive Nevill, who first read ghost stories to me and opened that door.
In order to better publicly appreciate the many people who created this book, I want to warmly acknowledge the patience, expertise and wisdom of Brian J. Showers of Swan River Press, Dublin, who has mentored me on producing the hardback edition and pretty much shone a light onto every aspect of independent publishing, from the printers to postage concerns and every detail in between. Couldn’t have done it without him and his considerable experience in producing collectable books. The work of my old friend and colleague Toby Clarke is also much appreciated in designing the jacket, as were the design and conversion services of Bluewave Publishing. I'm also heavily indebted to the artist, Mister Trece, who gave me permission to use his painting for the cover; his work seems to expose the root
s of nightmares. Something I also try and uncover, like deeply buried nerves, when I write.
Many thanks to the managing editorial team of Tony Russell, Paul King and Robin Seavill whom I have relied upon in my professional life for many years.
A very special mention must go to my clever wife, Anne, who has assisted me with developing Ritual Limited into more than just a name on the files at my accountants. Could not have done this without her.
Finally, let me thank every reader who has decided to own and to read this collection of selected horrors that have roared, or even just dripped, out of me over the last twenty years.
More Horror Fiction from Adam L. G. Nevill
Available in print and eBook at major book retailers.
Some Will Not Sleep
Selected Horrors
A bestial face appears at windows in the night.
In the big white house on the hill angels are said to appear.
A forgotten tenant in an isolated building becomes addicted to milk.
A strange goddess is worshipped by a home-invading disciple.
The least remembered gods still haunt the oldest forests.
Cannibalism occurs in high society at the end of the world.
The sainted undead follow their prophet to the Great Dead Sea.
A confused and vengeful presence occupies the home of a first-time buyer . . .