No One Gets Out Alive

March 2, 2015
Well-regarded British horror novelist Nevill (Apartment 16) does not disappoint in his latest standalone. Stephanie, a teenager estranged from her stepmother and desperate to make it on her own, rents a cheap room and immediately discovers that she’s made a huge mistake: the house is haunted, her landlord is abusive, and she has nowhere else to go. Over the following week, Stephanie is submerged in abject terror, bouncing from mundane despair to supernatural fright so quickly that the reader becomes disoriented—a sensation that only enhances the suspense. Rather than simply hanging his plot on evil ghosts, Nevill pits his heroine against two somewhat Roald Dahlian villains who serve as a chilling reminder that true horror is easily found in the real world. Their behavior is hauntingly depraved, but despite the highly sexual nature of their crimes, Stephanie herself is never made a sexual target—a welcome change from the horror fiction status quo. Though Nevill’s verbosity extends the book’s length by an unnecessary hundred pages or so, the slow and steady pace preys on the reader as much as the plot itself, eliciting a reading experience fraught with real chills.

February 15, 2015
British author Nevill (House of Small Shadows, 2014, etc.) out-Kings Stephen in this intense tale of seances, houses of ill repute and pervert convicts captured by The Other.Stephanie Booth is "a minimum wage temp, who couldn't afford to go to university." She rents a room at 82 Edgehill Rd. in Birmingham-a dwelling once occupied by The Friends of Light spiritualist group and then by the Bennets, a midcentury father/son pair of pimps and murderers. The current landlord, Knacker McGuire, "bloodless face...slit-eyed sneer," gives Stephanie a room which "looked like the scene of a potential suicide following an occupant's long period of depression, isolation and poverty." But it's Knacker's cousin, Fergal, "haggard and feral," whose perversions reveal to Stephanie that she resides in a house of horrors, one inhabited by the spirit of Black Maggie, a creature rooted in ancient fertility rites. Stephanie's an empathetic protagonist, killing her way out of peril, but Nevill's most vivid character is Knacker, right down to his Brummie ("bovver wiv all vat") accent. Stephanie, free of the Edgehill horror, grows rich on book and film rights, reinventing herself as Amber Hare. However, even after settling in southern England, Stephanie's nightmarish apparitions convince her that "the poor souls...had followed her from their wretched graves in Edgehill Road." Overwhelmed by "fear, regret, anxiety, hope and despair," Stephanie/Amber learns "the Bennets and Fergal [were] mere tools, homicidal tools...for something that found them useful." Tensions are high, the settings are ominous, and Nevill even offers cogent social observations, such as Stephanie learning that "everything she took for granted...like cooperation and manners and civility and privacy and laws," is lost when notoriety arrives. A macabre, otherworldly tale of a young woman "swallowed whole and alive by the horror that refused to be sated."

March 15, 2015

On her own in the English city of Birmingham, Stephanie is desperate to find a cheap place to live as she cobbles together temp jobs. She takes a room at 82 Edgehill Road, but from the first night she realizes that all is not right in the residence. The landlord is a rabbity, pervy slimeball called Knacker; the house is old and ill kept, with dirt and dust everywhere; and most unsettling are the voices, pleading for help. VERDICT The unpleasantness of a young woman forced by poverty to make some bad choices escalates to terror as the nature of her landlord and his scheme for the dwelling come to light. Sensitive readers might find the violence toward women and the damage it wreaks on Stephanie's psyche more horrifying than the supernatural scares. British author Nevill (Last Days; The Ritual) is incredibly skilled at building tension, and his thick-accented Birmingham villains drip menace.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2015
This great big anvil of horror lands hard from the get-go, with 19-year-old Stephanie shuddering in a dank, dark bedroom while voices come from the walls, and plasticthe kind you might wrap a corpse incrinkles from under the bed. It's her first night at 82 Edgehill Road, a decrepit apartment building run by a preening ne'er-do-well named Knacker. It's been six months since Stephanie ran away from home, and with no cash and nowhere to turn, she's stuck. Really stuck, especially when Knacker's brother, the brutal junkie Fergal, arrives with a horrific scheme to make moneyand Stephanie has a part to play. As with his marvelous The House of Small Shadows (2014), Nevill excels at giving his characters horrifically plausible motivations, which in turn make the supernatural elements feel unusually tangible. The chief spirit at play here is something called Black Maggie, and it's an achievement that she nearly rivals Fergal in conjuring up fear. The final 200 pages act as the book's own sequel, making this quite a generously grueling package.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)