Adam Nevill
Rating: A
No One Gets Out Aliveis the fourth novel I’ve read by Adam Nevill (Banquet of the Damned, Apartment 16 &The Ritual being the others) and is thus far my favorite, which is saying a lot considering the brilliance of the rest, The Ritualbeing a masterpiece. Simply put, No One Gets Out Alive is the greatest horror story I have ever read. It is also perhaps the most immersive book I’ve had the pleasure/displeasure of reading.
Dropped in a pot of boiling oil from the very first page, Nevill’s long, meticulously plotted tale of a hell on earth scenario never for a moment lets up. I felt like I was reading underwater, trapped with no way out and no end in sight, suffocating, suffering, trembling, losing my mind along with our tortured, haunted and supremely unlucky hero, Stephanie Booth. We are with her from the get-go, tethered to her side, making each and every scenario as terrifying and disgusting as if we were trapped in the pages of the book.
We meet Stephanie on her first night at 82 Edgehill Road (an address you will never forget after reading this book) waking from a nightmare to a cold, black room where sounds and voices seep from the walls, the floors, the fireplace, all around her, a nightmare worse than any terrors conjured in sleep. When the morning comes, we are vividly introduced to the derelict state of the home with rooms being rented out to “GIRLS ONLY” (read the advert Stephanie had come across in a desperate moment of need): “fly-specked lightshade”, “a watery yellow covered the walls”, “black spores erupted from damp plaster”, “the rug was crispy beneath the soles of her bare feet”. Nevill masterfully paints every corner and every nook of this house with such vile precision you can practically smell the stale air and feel the grime inches away from your body.
So, how did this beautiful, young girl (not yet twenty) come to find herself in this atrocious, unbearable situation? Why doesn’t she run out the front door and never look back the moment she starts to hear voices? Why the fuck is she still there one, two, three days later? One of the many impressive things Nevill does here is to answer every single question you will naturally come up with before you even get a chance to ask it. Stephanie is wholly and truly in an impossible situation. She is as trapped as a human could be without having shackles on in a steel room with no door or windows.
Making matters even worse is her landlord, the short and sinewy Knacker McGuire, who is as shifty, slimy and revolting of a human being as you could possibly imagine. His presence around Stephanie literally makes the reader want to recoil, to stay as far away from him as possible, pulling Stephanie back with us. If his presence isn’t bad enough, his cousin and co-owner of the house, Fergel, a towering, filthy man, seemingly always clad in a long overcoat, brings a level of danger and intimidation to Stephanie’s situation, one more tangible than the voices haunting her day and night.
The hours Stephanie spends in this house feel like days, and the days like weeks. We want so desperately for her to get out, for her sake and our own. Her journey is brutal, terrorizing and seemingly hopeless. The effects on her and us, the readers, are emotionally and physically exhausting. The tension in No One Gets Out Aliveis almost insufferable and the reality in which Nevill sets this spectral story is key to the hauntings seeping off the page and into our thoughts and dreams.
A modern masterpiece.
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