I’ve just finished my second dip into Adam Nevill’s writing, Banquet for the Damned, prompting me to review his writing rather than the book. I couldn’t help wondering what drew me in so. Simply, a rich vocabulary — a style that elevates the horror genre with a more artistic approach.
One thing that has occasionally made me grit my teeth has been having to dumb down. Editors say this in different ways but if told, ‘I’m not telling you to dumb down’, they are. Another way of expressing this is commercial fiction: short simple words, sentences, and paragraphs make for faster reading; readers can speed through books and hence purchase more.
Nothing wrong with this. Some genres or stories take to the fast pace with alacrity, and even within a leisurely pace there is the need to play with the velocity, speeding up and slowing down to suit the suspense and relaxed segments of the plot.
Still, people surprised me by contacting me praising my use of language, words, prose, narrative, style, and expression for my book, A Very Private Haunting all amounting to the same thing and making me feel many don’t frown on the use of a richer vocabulary as some would have us believe. A vocabulary I’ve often had to simplify to meet market demand, so you can imagine my delight when I stumbled over a writer I hadn’t read before who’s not afraid of opting for a more demanding word choice. If I tell you three of my favourite writers are Mervyn Peake, China Melville, and Carlos Ruiz Zafon, it should be no surprise I’m delighted to read an imaginative approach in one of my favourite genres.
I can see why this book will receive mixed reviews, and it’s owing to stylistic preference. On the first page, I sank into a rich vocabulary and longer sentences so often lacking in modern fiction. I don’t want to use the term literary as it carries an unfortunate modern-day connotation of dusty libraries and mildewed books written by notaries of a by-gone age (a sad view of the classics that were part of my childhood reading and nowadays periodically termed ‘too difficult’) and Nevill’s work isn’t like that, but one would have to say this is a more literary ‘style’ of horror.
Another way to describe it is I can see several editors returning the manuscript, circling a few sentences and referencing them as purple prose. Thank goodness the publisher ignored them if they did. The carefully chosen style weaves a successful spell on any reader able to appreciate the opulent seductive description spiced with the ‘creep’ factor; the sense that something is coming and might be present on the next turn of a page. This seems to be where Adam Nevill excels. I’ve read two of his titles so far, but will check out more.
