Apryl’s great aunt is dead. Died in a taxi not far from her home, an apartment near Knightbridge in Barrington House. Apryl’s mother had left her to sort out the flat and sell it, but Apryl wants to know more about the long lost aunt they haven’t heard from for so many years, and when she finds her aunt’s journals she encounters a world of treachery, secrets, murder and madness.
Seth works as the Night Porter as Barrington House. He’s an artist just doing his job to pay the rent. But there are strange noises coming from Apartment 16. Although he’s not allowed to enter the flat he knows he must, he is drawn to it, and he knows someone or something is inside. When Seth opens the door his life and his sanity will be torn to shreds…
Ooh, I like a book that starts with a Prologue that sends shivers down your spine. Horror novels aren’t always scary, some are gross-out gory, some are thrillers with an extra level of violence, very rarely does a book actually make you not want to go to sleep, to make you turn on all the lights at night, to make you not want to enter the darkness. But Apartment 16 is one of those books. It’s a basic haunted house story so well told, so chilling, so shocking, so menacing, you can’t help but be swept away by it.
It reminded me of Joe Hill’s The Heart-Shaped Box with its clean, concise prose and utterly terrifying strange presences. It’s a new ghost story, despite the familiar theme, we have much more than a simple ghost story here. The plot is well thought out, gradually drawing us deeper into the characters’ experiences; the murder mystery element keeps things moving along nicely, as does one of the characters the slow descent into madness.
There is also a touch of Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out, in the back-story.
There are so many good ideas in here that as a fellow writer it’s quite annoying. Every fifty pages I was thinking that would make a good story, this would make a good story, and Nevill has included them all in the one novel.
Shatteringly good, this one is creepy novel. A masterfully chilling debut.
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