The Ritual.

'The Ritual' is a novel by English author Adam Nevill, first published in 2011 - in the UK.
It was featured in a recent list of the fifty most terrifying novels ever written.
Challenge accepted.

(A brief note: this post contains spoilers, but I'll try to limit it to stuff that will not detract from the experience of the novel).

Four friends. Hutch, Phil, Luke & Dom. Many years ago they shared a flat. Those days are now immortalized in gauzy, golden hues in their memories. But they were a very long time ago. They haven't seen each other for years. They have grown distant, the gulf between them widening.
They meet up again for a hike through the lavish Scandinavian wilderness. It is to be a reunion of sorts, a way of putting the outside world at bay for a while and losing themselves once again in that haze of friendship.

But early on it becomes clear that Phil and Dom are not up to the task. They have grown fat and sluggish and are ill-prepared for the raw land beneath their feet. After a brief negotiation with Luke, Hutch decides that they should take a detour - a shortcut - that will slice a couple of days off the trek and might save their friends some additional pain and exhaustion. This detour will take them from the clear-cut tourist tracks and through the sparsest edge of a spread of largely-virgin forest.
Bad idea.

Into the scowling umbra of the woods they go. But the tracks they sought to follow among those trees are barely-there, worn away and swallowed by the bracken perhaps centuries ago.  They rapidly become lost - clutched in the lightless grip of the bush. Close to nightfall they come upon a house; beaten-down and scarred by the elements. It appears boarded up and abandoned. Eager for shelter, with what little strangled daylight had previously found its way among the foliage fading now, they break into the house.
Bad, bad idea.

Inside they find dust-grimed floors, the skitter-scrape of mice, walls hung with crudely fashioned crosses (some inverted), and a myriad of bleached and blackened animal skulls hung on nails. Upstairs they find something a great deal worse. They find proof that there was madness in these woods: madness, ritual and terrible deeds done in darkness and worship. Their sleep that night is haunted by vivid (and horribly similar) dreams, by sleep-walking and hysteria. By dawn they are exhausted, their skin blanched and their eyes shattered. They push on: desperate to be rid of the house, the forest, each other.

But in the deepest of the shadows something watches them - something that barks and gibbers and yelps. It is creature older than human civilization; a towering, stilt-legged, goat-snouted shape crowned in horns. It is sinuous and quick, hungry and eternal. And it is eager for fresh sacrifice.
In the woods and in the darkness, these four men will be hunted. Their suffering will be long and cruel and death when it comes will be slower still.

But this is not just a story of monsters, madness and survival. It is also a tale of thirty-something ennui. Of lives that have worn too thin and friendships that have become threadbare with time. It is the story of four old friends trying, and failing, to reconnect with each other.

Luke rapidly emerges as our protagonist. At first he is a difficult character to love. He is single and only sporadically-employed. Trivialized, marginalized and beaten down by the world. He nurses a constant, simmering rage that has recently begun to erupt into outright violence. He is a man disappointed; by himself, by the world, and by the friends with whom he has so very little left in common. Oddly, as the narrative progresses - we (the readers, obviously) come closer to him, drawn in by his brokenness and frustration. He is damaged and vulnerable, his existence fleeting and fragile. He is uncomfortably and utterly human, deeply flawed and self-loathing. This makes him seem more real to us, more convincing.

I won't lie to you, I felt immediately drawn to this character; although I know nothing of Luke's anger and little enough of his loneliness. As a single guy in my thirties myself this does seem very age-appropriate reading for me and the author's portrayal of that melancholy strikes a resonant chord. In a world where everyone becomes their own personal PR campaign - marketing the absolute-best / fantasy version of themselves via social media and networking platforms...well, the hardest thing to admit can be that everything is not going according to the plan. And this is the reality that Luke struggles with - the gulf between the truth of us and the mythology we have created.
But, anyway...

Luke is not alone in carrying a sack of woe upon his back. Of the four, only Hutch seems truly happy - he is recently married and still in excellent physical shape. Dom and Phil carry their own frustrations and disappointments; though both have families (and in Phil's case, considerable wealth). As the narrative progresses it becomes apparent that these seeming triumphs are illusory things too, and that both men have something they're keeping from their friends and perhaps even from themselves.

From the creeping dread of the earlier scenes - the discovery of the house in the woods, the stalking menace of the half-glimpsed something - the novel soon falls into the beats of the survival horror genre. Little-by-little the men are robbed of their humanity and driven against one another. The relentless grind of dripping trees and congealing darkness becomes exhausting to read - as the characters succumb to hunger and desperation, reduced to little more than shivering, starving animals crawling through mud and dead leaves, too weary even to speak.
In this, 'The Ritual' recalls 'The Ruins' by American author Scott Smith (brilliant and relentless novel; terrible goddamn movie). Although Nevill's novel is grander and laced with rich, occult mythology.

Then just as it seems that this narrative has been driven to its absolute limit (and with a solid chunk of novel yet to unfold) it abruptly changes course. It becomes what I can only describe as 'The Wicker Man' meets 'Antichrist' (yes, the infamous - and astonishing - film by Danish madman Lars von Trier) by way of the Norwegian black metal scene.
Nope, I'm not kidding about the black metal thing.

Again, Nevill proves himself very savvy in his choices (and meticulous in his research). The whole idea of metal musicians as genuinely evil lunatics who want to commit terrible atrocities against their fellow humankind is a z-movie concept - lazy and hackneyed. It just doesn't wash - for all that they were labeled a 'satanic band' Black Sabbath's main lyricist - Geezer Butler - is a lifelong Catholic (very explicit in the lyrics to 'After Forever'), Alice Cooper is devoutly Christian, Cradle of Filth are really just a bunch of clever, theatrical dudes who have watched way too many horror flicks. Of all the occult-metallers only King Diamond actually walked the talk - for a time he was a follower of Anton LaVey (author of the Satanic bible) - although Diamond treated this as more of a philosophy than a religion and in his later years has renounced religion in any form and declared himself an atheist.

But...

The Norwegian Black Metal scene is a different breed of beast, and one possessed of a history that is profoundly disturbing. Think of Varg Vikernes (aka Count Grishnackh) - the scowling vocalist/founder of black metal outfit Burzum. He is name-checked in 'The Ritual'. Vikernes is a white supremacist, a convicted murderer and now a suspected terrorist (also a JRR Tolkein fan presumably, given the name Burzum).
In 1993 he was jailed for the murder of Mayhem guitarist Oystein 'Euronymous' Aarseth. His music and work is considered a founding influence on the appalling genre that has come to be referred to as National Socialist Black Metal, though the Wikipedia entry on Vikernes reports that he never used Burzum to promote his own prejudiced beliefs.
Either way I can never listen to his music for the same reason that I can no longer watch a Roman Polanski film or listen to a Chris Brown song - okay, with Brown there's a whole bunch of other reasons for this avoidance.

There was a spate of church burnings across Norway; committed largely by fans of this music and inspired by the same philosophies that Nevill has a character articulate in the novel. Christianity came late to Norway and it came brutally, in a wash of blood and persecution; supplanting the pagan and pre-Christian worship of the people of that country. There is a long history of rage there.

All of which provides a context and makes it apparent why Nevill elected to set 'The Ritual' in Scandinavia - Sweden, to be precise. The Norwegian black metal kids in this novel are pathetic and contemptible - clowns in corpsepaint rather than greasepaint. They're idiots; arrogant, privileged and obsessed with the mythology of themselves...but that is a large part of what makes them so believable and genuinely frightening. In typing this I recall that the novel also reminded me, in part, of the superb and harrowing horror film 'Eden Lake' (a film that still stands as one of the most frightening things I've ever watched).

But there are supernatural monsters in 'The Ritual' too; from the beast-God in the woods, to the twitching and mummified dead in their shrine.
And there are rituals to be practiced and sacrifices to be made.
It is a world where mercy is a luxury and survival means sacrificing your humanity.

'The Ritual' is a cruel novel; an almost relentlessly grim tale. When it opens things are bad enough already and they only get worse as the narrative progresses. Shards of humour glint here and there but it is a cruel kind of mirth and offers little respite from the bleakness. The handful of almost-tender and forgiving moments are all-too-quickly consumed. Adam Nevill's literary voice is hugely compelling. His use of language is rich and evocative - appealing to all five senses (something of a rarity as I've always felt many writers neglect describing scents and odours). It is bleak and beautiful and the pace is relentless: the novel opens with the discovery of a gutted animal hung in the trees, thirty pages in and the four guys are at the house. You feel every wound the protagonists sustain and you understand their rage and despair. It is grand, contemporary myth-making.

I also appreciated the way Nevill captures the banal, brutal farce of violence; rifle butts jam against door frames, characters stumble and lurch clumsily from one punch to the next, one character tries - and fails - to fire a gun multiple times before realizing the safety is on. The reader never once feels that these are anything less (or more) than real people - undone by exhaustion and the horrible reality of what they're doing. It never feels staged or Hollywood-esque. I admired that.

I also note that Nevill lived for a time in New Zealand. I like to believe that this serves as an influence on the novel (for all that it is set in Sweden, and needs to be - for the mythology of the novel requires a long history; far longer than NZ has). The bush in this country is a dangerous thing - every few years a tramper underestimates it and strays from the beaten-down hiking paths. But the trees grow dense and dark and there is a predatory aspect. People disappear. Sometimes their bones are found later, blanched and brown shards among the leaf-rot. Sometimes they are never found at all. The term 'virgin' forest suggests a kind of innocence, a purity (Nevill has a character echo these sentiments in his novel) but that is a false impression. The bush eats the unwary.

But it is not a perfect novel. There is a rotten whiff of misogyny carried in the subtext. I'm not sure whether this reflects the author's personal prejudices or whether it is meant to be indicative of our flawed protagonist Luke (from whose perspective the tale is told). I'll assume the latter, but it still makes me uncomfortable - and not in the way one wants from a horror novel.

Nonetheless, this is a small misgiving. And 'The Ritual' by Adam Nevill is a complex and challenging work; one of those glorious novels that smuggles a literary aspect into a genre format. Nevill is a writer that I look forward to investigating further.