Wyrd and Other Derelictions - Experimental Horror at its Finest
Full disclosure: Hippocampus the first story in Adam Nevill’s new collection Wyrd and Other Derelictions, is the only story that is not original to the collection and it also happens to be a story that I mark as one of my favorite short stories of all time. When I first read that story a few years ago, I was enthralled with the idea of a story with no characters, it was just a description of a place, at a specific moment in time. We, as the reader, are taken on a journey through that place and over the course of the story find out what has recently happened on (in this case) a ship adrift at sea. In the same instance, the reader is given an idea of what may happen in the future but again, we are only seeing this one moment in time. A story without characters that manages to build the kind of tension that Nevill creates in Hippocampus made me look at my own writing in a different way. It changed the way I wrote fiction.
When I realized that Wyrd was not just a new collection of short stories from Nevill, but a collection of stories that were all in the same ‘family’ as Hippocampus, I was excited. I’d never read anything like Hippocampus and now I was going to get six more stories just like it. There are no characters in this collection of stories. No people for the reader to identify with. Just like that original short story I read, this collection is about putting the reader in certain situations and letting them discover—with some guidance— what has happened, or is happening in each of the situations presented.
I’m sure you can tell just by the build up for all of this, that I loved this collection. In my opinion, Nevill’s greatest strength as a writer is his ability to describe a setting and set the mood. In The Ritual he created a forest that no one would want to find themselves lost in. The setting of The Reddening was both beautiful and terrible. These stories and locations Nevill created in them rival those featured in any of his other books.
The stories are short and though I usually give a brief description of my favorites, I’m going to refrain from doing that here because the best part of reading these stories is the way Nevill is able to pull the reader through the different scenes slowly revealing more and more until the reader has all of the information they need to get a clear picture of the scene they are a witness to.
I can’t recommend this collection of stories enough. This is experimental literary horror and the experiment has exceeded all expectations. Read this and enjoy the horrific scenes Nevill has laid out for you.
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