Robin Marx's Writing Repository

This review originally appeared on Goodreads on January 28, 2020.

Before You Sleep: Three Horrors

By Adam L.G. Nevill – RITUAL LIMITED – August 23, 2016

Review by Robin Marx

This free sampler contains three short horror stories from Adam Nevill's first collection, Some Will Not Sleep: Selected Horrors. I enjoyed Nevill's novel The Ritual (recently adapted as a Netflix movie), and the stories collected here have a similar ominous feel.

The first story, “Where Angels Come In,” is very effectively creepy. It involves two boys exploring an abandoned building, only to find it occupied by a variety of terrifying creatures. The ghostly inhabitants are very imaginatively described, and the impressionistic touch given the violence in the story makes it even more disturbing. I was impressed by how well executed this story was despite the somewhat well-worn premise.

The second installment, “Ancestors,” was well done, but not quite as engaging. In this story, a young girl finds herself living in an old home secretly inhabited by animated toys and a snuggly girl of a similar age who is, to the reader, blatantly a ghost. While the premise is intriguing, there were a few storytelling choices made that ended up hurting the story in my opinion. One was the vague touch with description. While the blurry lens worked in the first story, it obscured events just a little too much this time. I also felt the decision to make the family Japanese was a little baffling. The setting of the story didn't seem tied to a particular locale; the way the house was described (e.g., with several fireplaces) didn't sound particularly Japanese in terms of architecture, and no specific folklore appeared to be drawn on apart from the fairly familiar Sadako/Kayako-style ghost girl. I'm not saying all stories about Japanese people have to go all-in on cultural references, but this story would have been much the same had it been about an English family in Nevill's native England.

The third and final story, “Florrie,” was the weakest one in the bunch for me. A young man buys a house that an elderly woman had died in, and finds himself increasingly influenced by her ghost. The writing was fine, but it happened to be the third haunted house story in a row, and the effects of said ghost struck me as more comical than creepy.

While it felt like the book ended off on a bit of a weak note, it fulfilled its purpose of introducing me to the short fiction of Adam Nevill. I liked what I saw, and I plan to read more by this author.

★★★☆☆

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