“The Gods are here, if they are anywhere at all in the world,” Algernon Blackwood. This quote from The Willows opens this creepy ass novel by Adam Nevill. I’d heard a lot about Adam Nevill but had yet to get around to any of his novels. When I saw Netflix was adapting The Ritual into a movie, I decided it’d be a perfect time and place to get started. I wasn’t disappointed.

The Ritual won the British Fantasy Society’s 2012 August Derleth Award for best horror novel. The story follows four friends on a camping trip in the Scandinavian wilderness of the Arctic Circle. A pair of accidents happen and the group decides to take a shortcut through a thicker part of the forest. They come across a mutilated elk hanging from a tree, higher than a human or any animal they know of would be able to reach. Then they find a house, an ancient deserted house with an odd shrine upstairs. Things go from bad to worse as the group becomes lost, hungry, and convinced of something ancient stalking them through a millennia-old forest.

The opening Blackwood quote perfectly sets the tone for the story. Here, like in some of Blackwood’s best, we have modern people venturing into a wilderness that doesn’t want them. In this case, a dark wilderness from mankind’s barbaric past. They find remnants of a pagan cemetery, a church, habitation, and all of it points to dark rites and the worship of a creature as old as the trees surrounding them. It is a slow, dark, creeping tale that weaves between the trees and under your skin, and leaves you disturbed long after you put it down.

About halfway through, the story shifts. One or more of the campers get rescued, or so they think. A Death Metal band has come to the wilderness to worship the creature, a god they call it. This is when the book slows down a bit for me, and why it gets four instead of five stars. While there are some very creepy scenes and important story points that explain the creature and structures found in the woods, it drags a lot. My paperback copy has 420 pages: the first 200 is all trek through the forest, the next 180 is captured by the band and pagans, with the last 40 being a fight against the people and attempted escape from the creature. The first half and the ending are great, but the 180-page section in the center could easily have been cut down to 80 pages without losing anything important. At 320 to 350 pages, The Ritual is a great, five-star horror novel, but 420 is just too long and slow. It really bogs down while at the pagan encampment.

The ending, those final 40 pages or so, pays off the drudge through the second half of the book and then some. It is creepy, well executed, and satisfying in a way that doesn’t always happen in horror stories—walking the fine line between a happy(ish) ending and an unhappy one. Who dies? Does the monster win? Do the main characters save the day or simply survive to see another one, or endure a painful, disgusting demise? The Ritual gets it right.

If you like remote settings, creeping dread, and ancient pagan rites come to life this book is for you. I really enjoyed, and look forward to watching the movie and to reading more by Adam Nevill. Here’s the Amazon link to the paperback.