Christopher Buehlman's Reviews > The Vessel

Adam L.G Nevill is busily repopulating England with lost gods, and I’m here for it. THE VESSEL is a lean book that punches above its weight, with a small cast, intimate spaces, and Nevill’s characteristic palette of horrors in bone white, blood red and rot black. More mundane terrors are in no short supply, as Jess, our protagonist, walks a tightrope too many single mothers will recognize, with an abusive ex partner and an insufferable job threatening her every step towards a better future for herself and little Izzy. The shadow cast by the estranged husband is deftly painted, the scar on Jess’s mouth quietly giving the lie to Tony’s ‘wronged father’ act and making sense of how she goes tharn when he calls or shows up unannounced. Jess’s job as a caretaker for an elderly dementia patient in a cluttered, decaying vicarage is bad enough with her stern boss and contemptful co-worker—when inexplicable events begin to occur, the harried mother finds the only way out of her trap is further in. To say more would be theft, so I’ll leave off with a fresh declaration of rapture at Nevill’s craft. The field of 21st century horror offers the reader an embarrassment of riches, with gifted new masters lording over their several fiefdoms; Nevill has his kingdom of gloomy thickets and dread elder deities well in hand, and you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone weaving darker nightmares with smarter, more beautiful prose.