Under a Watchful Eye by Adam Nevill is a supernatural thriller from the award-winning writer of The Ritual and Last Days.
Seb Logan is being watched. He just doesn't know by whom.
When the sudden appearance of a dark figure shatters his idyllic coastal life, he soon realizes that the murky past he thought he'd left behind has far from forgotten him. What's more unsettling is the strange atmosphere that engulfs him at every sighting, plunging his mind into a terrifying paranoia.
To be a victim without knowing the tormentor. To be despised without knowing the offence caused. To be seen by what nobody else can see. These are the thoughts which plague his every waking moment.
Imprisoned by despair, Seb fears his stalker is not working alone, but rather is involved in a wider conspiracy that threatenfs everything he has worked for. For there are doors in this world that open into unknown places. Places used by the worst kind of people to achieve their own ends. And once his investigation leads him to stray across the line and into mortal danger, he risks becoming another fatality in a long line of victims . . .
Disclaimer: It should, of course, go without saying, but this is my personal opinion and nothing more. Yours may be different, and that's cool.
Daniel's thoughts:
Adam Nevill has never written a bad or boring novel (or story, or possibly word) as far as I’m concerned, but this is one Nevill Novel (Novill?) which I feel doesn’t get anywhere near the love it deserves.
Nevill’s 2017 book Under A Watchful Eye was his last traditionally-published novel; after that, he made the decision to set up his own Ritual Limited imprint to bring out a series of titles, beginning with The Reddening. Despite Nevill’s status as the UK’s biggest commercial horror novelist, Under A Watchful Eye was released with little fanfare and didn’t make anything like the splash it should have. How much of a role that played in Nevill’s decision to take the production, promotion and release of his books entirely into his own hands I’m not sure. But Under A Watchful Eye is as good as anything Nevill’s done, which any reader of his work knows is saying a great deal.
The book’s protagonist, Seb Logan, at first glance shares many qualities with Nevill himself. He’s a novelist who after many years of hardship has achieved major commercial success and prosperity, and who now lives on the beautiful Devon coast. Unlike Nevill, he’s a solitary man, a loner by nature. He’s also a man with a devout sense of order and neatness, bordering on OCD, which suffers a brutal blow when Ewan, a former college flatmate, turns up and inveigles his way back into Seb’s life.
Out of all Nevill’s books, Under A Watchful Eye is probably the most reminiscent of Ramsey Campbell. One of the features that strikes me about Campbell’s fiction is how often his characters find themselves battling forces that are all the worse for being intangible. Robin struggling with her mother’s descent into paranoia and accusations of drug addiction in Obsession, facing an opponent that threatens her own career and sanity but which is also a person she dearly loves; Amy in The House of Nazareth Hill, caught in an ever-tightening web of restrictions from her father as the evil in the old house takes possession of him. The most insidious and frightening things in horror fiction are the ones you can’t fight, especially not if you aren’t a movie action man.
Which Seb Logan definitely isn’t. Even before the supernatural aspects of the novel crank into gear, he’s up against the reappearance of Ewan, his grimy housemate from university. The man’s worked his way into Seb’s home before he knows it, and simply won’t leave. Seb is afraid to throw him out physically, and Ewan refuses to listen to – or even hear – anything he doesn’t want to. He’s cunning and manipulative, and plays on that peculiarly British horror, the dread of making ‘a scene.’ But then the supernatural stuff begins to intrude.
I will admit these are some of the most horrible and unnerving parts of the novel: the results of experiments in astral projection that went horribly wrong, trapping countless innocent, trusting protagonists in an awful limbo between life and death. Although the Society for Psychical Research devolved into a cult, many of these awful wraiths are victims. They did nothing wrong, just trusted the wrong person: M.L. Hazzard, the leader of the cult, who still exerts control over its remnants beyond death. Like the Blood Friends in Last Days, Hazzard inhabits a dreadful, desolate realm, a spiritual wasteland, but continues to claim the mantle of visionary, prophet and king.
Not all the wraiths are innocent, though: Hazzard’s more than capable of invoking far less pleasant phantoms, chief among which is the terrifying Thin Len (even the name is horribly evocative.) And it turns out there are living survivors of his cult as well, who are every bit as dangerous.
There’s a rather ingenious meta twist two-thirds of the way through the book; in the hands of some authors it would seem a cheap trick, but in Nevill’s it only serves to deepen the horror. Seb is living in a nightmare, one from which even death might be no escape from. And there’s nothing here that can be defeated by anything so simple as a silver bullet or wooden stake.
I really don’t feel this poor review of mine does anything like justice to the creeping horror that Under A Watchful Eye evokes: the horror of losing control, over your life, over your career or vocation, over your soul. As I said, I feel it’s the most underappreciated of the Novills, and maybe part of that is because of how difficult it is to conjure that atmosphere up here. All I can do, then, is recommend you seek it out, if you haven’t already.
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