Will I love The Ritual?

Let’s start off with: if my old friends called me up for a hike into the Scandinavian wilderness, I’d tell them to have fun and send pictures. Thankfully, I am not a horror story protagonist.

In horror, I love a creepy forest setting. What could be watching you? How dangerous is it? I felt like I was in the forest, lost, alone with friends I may no longer trust. And then, when things got weird, we had to escape a monster too.

Was it a bit of a departure? Yes. Was I here for it? Also yes. It felt like… show more.

This book, a horror story, takes place in a remote forest in Sweden. This was not a familiar location to me, and that added to the creepiness. A combination of a monster story and murderous cult-like group and characters facing an impossible situation made this an enjoyable, slightly different horror story. I would definitely try something else my this author.

This is one of the few novels that genuinely scared me. I was so tense during the first half of the book when the friends were hiking in a remote Swedish wilderness and being hunted by… something. Nevill does an amazing job of keeping the tension through this part of the book pulled so taut that I was mesmerized.

Then I was completely caught out by the turn the novel takes around the middle and it started to appeal to everything I love about folk horror and the supernatural, and it appealed to my love of heavy music. One of… show more.