So much has happened here, Arthur, and it doesn’t sit well, down there, under all this stone. Don’t you get a sense of that? Old things. Old beliefs. And you can’t burn old beliefs out of existence, and merely replace one system with another. Every revolution and reformation can be undone. And what of the lives and aspirations cut short here? Can’t you sense them? The weight of injustice? Does it just disperse? Or does it linger for the careful eye to see, and the trained ear to hear? I wonder about this town, old friend. Reminds me of Salem. … There is power beneath these flagstones, Arthur. You mark my words.”
— Eliot Coldwell
The history of St. Andrews includes more than golf. The University there, the oldest in the country, is considered Scotland’s Oxford. Many of the town’s buildings are centuries old, with religious affiliations and affiliations to deeds both noble and ignoble performed in God’s name: Not all the dead of St. Andrews have been peacefully laid to rest.
Dante and Tom are Birmingham rockers, refugees from a broken band, looking for inspiration for their second album. Dante has been deeply influenced by the book, Banquet for the Damned whose author, Eliot Coldwell, has spent his life studying the world’s religions and finding odd similarities and confluences among them, even the obscure ones. His only book details his experiences and adventures in distant parts of the world, his experimentation with drugs and sex, his spiritual searching. In the wake of publication he became something of a cause célèbre and a small scale 1960s counter-culture guru and hero for many disaffected youths. An exchange of letters, and Dante is off to St. Andrews to act as research assistant to Coldwell, an elderly man now who for a few years has been a contracted lecturer at the University.
Parking their car on arrival, Dante and Tom walk down to the sea shore, enjoying the salt air until they notice an ambulance and several people farther along the beach. Getting closer, they see the people are appalled by and hovering around an arm on the sand.
Meanwhile, tipped by a friend about odd events of possible interest, Hart Miller, an American anthropologist teetering on the brink of alcoholism, also arrives in St. Andrews. Miller has been following an odd occurrence across cultures, though until now among less technologically sophisticated cultures. These occurrences he’s dubbed night terrors, incidents of people disavowing loved ones, afraid of them, certain they are no longer the friend or relative they once were, but someone other. In his previous studies Miller has seen the results of the night terrors and collected the stories of how they came to be resolved; in St. Andrews he becomes convinced he’s arrived at the onset.
As summer nears its end and students begin to return, events in St. Andrews have been escalating – a young man immolated in his car, a young woman displaying a new, darker personality, several students going missing. In the dark recesses of St. Andrews, powers are reasserting themselves, ancient powers bloody-minded and with grudges.
Banquet for the Damned is the first novel of supernatural horror by Adam Nevill (byline in early editions, Adam L. G. Nevill) and is a well-written, well-orchestrated novel of ancient witchcraft reemerging in the modern world. Chapter one establishes the threat with a brief, effective scene and then the novel gradually pays out the story and the characters against the wonderful and rather ominous background of St. Andrews, where Nevill studied for a time.
In an afterward Nevill acknowledges M. R. James, Algernon Blackwood and Walter de la Mare as conscious inspirations. The engine powering Nevill’s tale is that of the Jamesian ghost story which Nevill filters through social mores that have changed drastically since James’ time. James would probably have been as appalled by the 1960s and sex, drugs and rock’n’roll (all more implied than depicted here) as by one of his ghosts or demons, but his approach to the ghost story generates remarkable power, and if Nevill’s prose isn’t as elegant he has an admirable ability to coordinate the elements of his story and deploy them efficiently. One of the blurbs on my edition comes from Ramsey Campbell, who singles out chapter thirty-seven as “offer[ing] a house possessed by evil, a condition so powerfully characterized that I would class the passage among the great sustained scenes of modern supernatural horror.” And I would agree that Nevill achieves that and mainly through the sort of implication James used. Another suggestion of James comes from the character, Eliot Coldwell. Nevill says Coldwell is based on the late Colin Wilson (who wrote more than one book, including philosophy, fiction an accounts of true crime) but in this book his position recalls and is analogous to that of Mr. Karswell in James’ story “Casting the Runes”: Like Karswell, Coldwell is a man with a tentative grasp on esoteric knowledge, tempted by its use, perhaps over-awed by what he’s wrought, with little control over the forces he has let loose on the world.
If you’ve read Nevill’s later novel, The Ritual, and enjoyed it, this would be a good follow-up. If you haven’t read Nevill, this or The Ritual would be a good introduction.
BANQUET FOR THE DAMNED by Adam Nevill
(Virgin Books, 2008)
544 pages
ISBN: 978-1447240921
Review by Randy Money
