The Ritual

I can't recommend this book, but it does get a second star for a few beautifully creepy scenes.

In fact, a smart and merciless editor could probably make this into a very memorable and well-crafted novella. Unfortunately, these germs of a good, short story are drowning in two whole additional books' worth of boring garbage. TWO!

There are far too many cycles of “The group makes a bad decision, we read in painful detail about them slogging through the woods, Luke has internal monologue about how he is or isn't an emotionally arrested loser, Luke thinks derisively about how fat his companions are and/or how awful their wives are, the group confronts the reality that they are in much greater danger than they realized, but they have to keep going and stay together.” And most of the time, the danger in question is from them being lost, injured, and running out of supplies, not from the monster. It's extremely tedious. A.'s review does a great job of calling out the sexism and fat-phobia, but mostly it failed to make an impression on me because I was just so bored.

And then suddenly the book shifts to a kind of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Swedish Death Metal Edition. Which quickly becomes an endless, dull cycle of its own, with pointless, repetitive conversations between Luke and his captors. Why are we even here, never mind going over the same ground again and again?

The good stuff here was good enough that I almost want to try more of Nevill's work, but I'm really worried that it'll be more bloated text and too peppered with faux-philosophical musings that are really just wrappers for prejudice and justification of violent sociopathy. Hopefully he was just trying to paint Luke's character with all that, but you do get the sense that Nevill himself is either a financially unsuccessful loner who's trying to justify that to himself with this book, or a traditionally successful suburban doughy guy who fantasizes about being a superfit single guy without a family tying him down, who can win fistfights and sleep with many ladies.