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The Ritual (2011)

by Adam Nevill(Favorite Author)

3.61 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0230754929 (ISBN13: 9780230754928)

languge

English

genre

Horror

publisher

Pan Publishing

review 1: There are many small pleasures to be found in "The Ritual," even if it never quite adds up to a coherent whole. It seems to me that Nevill's "prose reach" far exceeds his "prose grasp." He never quite gets to that special place that his acknowledged influence Cormac McCarthy inhabits with every sentence: there are too many lapses in diction, too many dud dialogue bits, too many cliches, too many sentences without a subject that start with "Then." Still, I like the general thrust of the story, which goes from very bad to even worse, and I admire Nevill's patience in telling it. Even though "The Ritual" deals with familiar themes and has some fairly predictable scenes, I can't say I was ever bored. Heck, even the final fifty pages, which, let's face it, are kind of ridi... moreculous and, in many ways, give up on the whole "suspense" thing, had me flipping pages like some kind of Stephen King fan.
review 2: A great writer can make the most mundane of stories interesting, and this book, which has the initial plot of four guys lost in the woods, was written so well that I could feel the tension and creeping unease long before anything scary actually happened. This was one of those rare books that kept me thinking about it all day, eager to get home and finish it because I HAD to know what would happen next. It would have been five stars if not for the last 10% of the book which was unfortunately a bit of a letdown. However I will now read everything by this author. less

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