Ritual

From Britain's 'master of horror', Adam Nevill, comes The Ritual, winner of the August Derleth Award and perfect for fans of Stephen King. Now a major film with Rafe Spall.Four old university friends reunite for a hiking trip in the Scandinavian wilderness of the Arctic Circle. No longer young men, they have little left in common and tensions rise as they struggle to connect. Frustrated and tired they take a shortcut that turns their hike into a nightmare that could cost them their lives. Lost, hungry and surrounded by forest untouched for millennia, they stumble across an isolated old house. Inside, they find the macabre remains of old rites and pagan sacrifices; ancient artefacts and unidentifiable bones. A place of dark ritual and home to a bestial presence that is still present in the ancient forest, and now they’re the prey. As the four friends struggle toward salvation they discover that death doesn’t come easy among these ancient trees . . .

This novel grabs from the very first page, refuses to be laid aside, and carries the hapless reader, exhausted and wrung out, to the very last sentence., Often horror loses its power when the evil is given a face; in this case it only gets more disturbing., With The Ritual Nevill has crafted some of the tensest scariest horror this reviewer has read for years., The Ritual by Adam Nevill is a mind-twisting journey into the dark backwoods of terror. Deeply disturbing and absolutely riveting., Nevill makes the natural world deeply menacing, using the power of suggestion rather than explicit images to create a growing claustrophobic feeling as the difficult journey to return to some semblance of civilization embeds the quartet only further in the grasp of primal evil.

Adam L.G. Nevill was born in Birmingham, England, in 1969 and grew up in England and New Zealand. He is the author of the horror novels: Banquet for the Damned, Apartment 16, The Ritual, Last Days, House of Small Shadows, No One Gets Out Alive, Lost Girl and Under a Watchful Eye. His first short story collection, Some Will Not Sleep: Selected Horrors, was published on Halloween, 2016. His novels, The Ritual, Last Days and No One Gets Out Alive were the winners of The August Derleth Award for Best Horror Novel. The Ritual and Last Days were also awarded Best in Category: Horror, by R.U.S.A. Many of his novels are currently in development for film and television, and in 2016 Imaginarium adapted The Ritual into a feature film.Adam lives in Devon, England.