Book and Film Review: No One Gets Out Alive
Oh the horror, horrors, many horrors…
After the disappointment that was Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic, I was hungry for horror fiction about an evil house and remembered Adam Nevill’s No One Gets Out Alive (Pan Books, 2014). There’s a Netflix adaptation, but books before movies, I say, so I cracked open this 628-page beast. I was hoping for the absolute worst, which is to say a damn fine read in horror terms, but I expected it to be stupid, boring and a waste of time, because Sturgeon’s law isn’t wrong. Now that I’ve made it through, I’m here to report that my hopes were fulfilled and my expectations dashed.
In late capitalism, it’s a long way to the bottom, but Stephanie is getting there. Without a steady job, she’s piecing together temp work to stave off homelessness. When she finds an apartment that’s cheap enough for the “skint,” she moves in and immediately regrets it. Her landlord Knacker is dishonest and creeping on her, but his cousin Fergal is worse. Then she begins hearing voices where there shouldn’t be any, seeing people who are only there in spirit, and locking her door against the phantom stench of a malicious male. Is there a connection between the physical threat to her person in the form of her landlords and the paranormal activity undermining her sanity? And how can she improve her situation when the world is doing its best to grind her into just another victim?
I knew right away that No One Gets Out Alive was a keeper. The horrors begin on the first page and continue in a straight line through to the end, so Nevill knows how to plot. Yet he also takes his time to ensure that when the reader asks questions — Why doesn’t Stephanie just leave? How does all this tie together? —answers are available. The style is perfect for a steady, inexorable fall into deeper darkness, never as unhinged as peak Stephen King, never gory for the sake of gore, neither straining for high-brow laurels nor stooping to chattiness, but walking you through in natural cadences that pick up the pace when your eyes can’t cover the words fast enough. It’s impressive work.
Nonetheless, the novel does demonstrate, if not defects, then a couple curious authorial choices. Despite the on-rails plotting, Nevill has Stephanie move out of one room and into another room early in the novel, spending chapters on events that feel functionally repetitive. I’d be interested to know why Nevill chose to do this, but I have to admit it all held my interest. Similarly, I winced at his choice to follow what felt like a natural conclusion with a couple hundred more pages, a final act that started slow. Yet the narrative picked up, and a few chapters later I was hooked again and racing through to the end.
Book read, I moved on to the movie, which transports the setting from Birmingham, England to Cleveland, Ohio and transforms Stephanie into an illegal immigrant from Mexico named Ambar. Cristina Rodlo is sweet and likable in the lead role but lacks anything distinguishing as a scream queen, and the rest of the cast is unremarkable. If it had been up to me, I would have played up what wild characters Knacker and Fergal are, Rob Zombie does Laurel and Hardy, Tim Burton does Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton, J.P. Williams does Rob Zombie and Tim Burton, but instead we get a couple lumps of meat that would look more appropriate in one of those films where the rednecks have a thing for drooling, power tools and young flesh.
The filmmakers, not having tried hard enough in casting and characterization, have tried too hard in other areas. The apartment building looks gothic-luxurious, like a smashing East Coast bed-and-breakfast rather than the kind of dump where the paint peels, the furniture reeks, and the Girl Scouts just trying to sell some Thin Mints go missing only to reappear later on Cold Case Files. The same misguided attention ruins the gnarly creature design by showing it in the light of too many candles, whereas the book keeps the events in the “black room” shadowy, mysterious and more horrifying. The film horrifies, but the book horrifies better.
Haunted houses, from Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto to Amanda Seyfried’s Things Heard & Seen to the one in your hometown, overgrown and waiting to gobble up thrill-seeking teenagers, are a timeless theme, and Nevill’s contribution is, in the words of Megs_bookrack on Goodreads, an “emotionally-exhausting mindfuck” that deserves “every trigger warning EVER.” The book may take time to do its worst, but boring, stupid and a waste of time it most certainly is not.
Rating: 4/5 bookmark tassles
Note: I wrote this for Medium.com. If you are reading this on another platform, it has been pirated. I quit the Medium Partner Program, so I’m not doing this for money. It is nice, however, to know someone’s reading, so please clap or comment to let me know somebody’s out there. Gladius adhuc lucet.
