Die and be released, and in your releasing so also release me. After perhaps the eighth or ninth chapter devoted to informing the reader that The Hiking Crew is Exhausted Physically and Psychologically, with the prose retreading the exact same ups and downs with every iteration, I was praying for them to die. Structurally The Ritual's great problem is that it is two novels, neither one of which ought to be even a quarter so long as the actual product. Scenes that ought to be tense and frightening, or tense and thrilling, are instead slogs: why allow the reader to infer that it is instinct that causes Luke to turn and run to the tent when Nevill could instead write a paragraph-long treatise about ancient ancestral instincts reawakening, etc? What could be more powerfully accomplished in a brief, curt sentence, he fluffs into page after page of navel-gazing, Intro to Theology philosophizing. Where McCarthy uses these structures to create atmosphere, by providing cold and grounded details, Nevill uses them as hammers to beat into your head what he wants you to think and to feel. Run-on sentences and sentence fragments, abandoned phrases, writhe across the page. Within the first chapter of The Ritual, it was painfully obvious that Nevill is trying - and failing tremendously - at aping McCarthy's stylistic flourishes. In the foreword, Nevill credits a number of other authors for inspiring him, among them Cormac McCarthy. Here it is in brief: The Ritual is a derivative, shallow, insidiously sexist novel from an author whose ideas far exceed his technical skill. What sin did I commit to have deserved a book as god awful as The Ritual? See our wiki for past AMAs.Every now and then you come across a book that causes you to examine your life: the good you've done in the world, the ill.

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The Ritual by Adam Nevill