Abstract
This chapter examines the imagery of evil in the work of the British horror writer Adam Nevill. It argues that Nevill’s interest in the stains and material traces left by evil echoes a Christian grammar of evil derived from the concept of Original Sin. In Nevill’s fiction, as in Christian theology, talk about and artistic representation of evil always threatens to perpetuate the very evil that it seeks to describe. The chapter concludes by exploring distorted images of resurrection in Nevill’s work and argues that his fiction imagines the horror of a world in which sin is a reality and redemption is impossible.
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- 1.
Adam Nevill, The Ritual (London: Pan, 2011), pp. 350–1. Further references are given parenthetically with the abbreviation TR.
- 2.
Adam Nevill, Banquet for the Damned (London: Pan, 2014), pp. 280–1. Further references are given parenthetically with the abbreviation BftD.
- 3.
Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. by Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon, 1969), p. 29.
- 4.
Mark Knight, An Introduction to Religion and Literature (New York and London: Continuum, 2009), p. 97.
- 5.
Francis Spufford, Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense (London: Faber & Faber, 2012), p. 27.
- 6.
Alan Jacobs, Original Sin: A Cultural History (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), p. xvii.
- 7.
Knight, An Introduction to Religion and Literature, p. 105.
- 8.
Adam Nevill, Apartment 16 (London: Pan, 2010), p. 31. Further references are given parenthetically with the abbreviation A16.
- 9.
Julian Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), p. 5.
- 10.
Adam Nevill, House of Small Shadows (London: Pan, 2013), p. 167. Further references are given parenthetically with the abbreviation HoSS.
- 11.
Gary A. Anderson, Sin: A History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 4.
- 12.
Colin E. Gunton, The Christian Faith: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), p. 61.
- 13.
Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology: Volume 2: The Works of God (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 139.
- 14.
Knight, An Introduction to Religion and Literature, p. 96.
- 15.
Rowan Williams, Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement (Edinburg: T & T Clark, 2000), p. 162.
- 16.
Adam Nevill, Last Days (London: Pan, 2012), pp. 14–15. Further references are given parenthetically with the abbreviation LD.
- 17.
Paul W. Kahn, Out of Eden: Adam and Eve and the Problem of Evil (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 52.
- 18.
Rowan Williams, On Augustine (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), p. 88.
- 19.
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (London: Penguin, 2006 [1963]), p. 52.
- 20.
Williams, On Augustine, p. 103. For a fuller critical response to Arendt’s reading of Augustine, see Charles T. Mathewes, Evil and the Augustinian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 149–97.
- 21.
For a fuller discussion of literary responses to and representations of the financial crash and its aftermath, see Katy Shaw, Crunch Lit (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2015).
- 22.
Alan Gregory, ‘“Surrounded by the Relics of a World…Long Gone”: Dickensian Visions of Frozen Time in Adam Nevill’s House of Small Shadows’, unpublished conference paper, presented at the Contemporary Gothic Study Day, Lancaster University, May 2014. I am grateful to Dr. Gregory for sharing his research with me.
- 23.
Marilyn McCord Adams, Christ and Horrors: The Coherence of Christology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 271.
- 24.
Jürgen Moltmann, ‘Christianity: A Religion of Joy’, in Miroslav Volf and Justin E. Crisp (eds.), Joy and Human Flourishing: Essays on Theology, Culture, and the Good Life (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), pp. 1–15 (p. 15).
- 25.
See the detailed discussion in N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (London: SPCK, 2003).
- 26.
Valentine Cunningham argues that the narrative trajectory from struggle to ekstasis is a legacy of the modern novel’s inheritance of biblical narrative structure. See Cunningham, ‘The Novel and the Protestant Fix’, in Mark Knight and Thomas Woodman (eds.), Biblical Religion and the Novel, 1700–2000 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 39–57.
- 27.
Adam Nevill, No One Gets Out Alive (London: Pan, 2014), p. 468.
- 28.
John Sears, Stephen King’s Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011), p. 16.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Nevill, Adam. 2010. Apartment 16. London: Pan.
———. 2011. The Ritual. London: Pan.
———. 2013. House of Small Shadows. London: Pan.
———. 2014b. No One Gets Out Alive. London: Pan.
———. 2015. Lost Girl. London: Pan.
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Marsden, S. (2018). ‘There Were Some Stains That Could Not Be Removed’: Adam Nevill and the Stain of Sin. In: The Theological Turn in Contemporary Gothic Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96571-0_3
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