Apartment 16

I'm always on the lookout for the next BIG SCARE, more so since the market has been flooded with defanged vampires and domesticated werewolves that have even less bite than my mother's toothless pet poodle. So when I saw Adam Nevill's Apartment 16, I snatched it up with the hopes of getting drawn into a creepy haunted house-type story. I didn't get ghosts. What I got was far worse -- in a good way.Set in the heart of London, Barrington House is a grand old apartment building with a sinister secret. When Apryl's great aunt passes away, all of her worldly possessions, including her apartment in Barrington House, are left to Apryl and her mother. It is Apryl's responsibility to come to England and settle her aunt's affairs, sell off the belongings and the apartment, and then return home. When Apryl arrives, she is quite taken with the affluence of the building and quite fancies herself living there. She soon finds, however, that the beautifully maintained lobby is only a facade. The apartments within Barrington house have certainly seen better days if her great aunt Lillian's place is representative of the other apartments. It's obvious to Apryl that everything she has heard since arriving at Barrington House is true -- Great Aunt Lillian was not right in the head. It is obvious that the old woman was a hoarder, and she had an aversion to mirrors and pictures, as the walls are bare. There is evidence that mirrors and pictures had once adorned the walls as noted by the discolorations on the walls, but they have been taken down and put into storage. When Apryl discovers a series of journals written by her great aunt, it depicts Lillian's descent into madness, but there's more to it. Much more. And everything she learns leads her to Apartment 16.Meanwhile, Seth, a porter who works at Barrington House is being haunted by a young boy who has seduced him into entering Apartment 16, an apartment that has stood empty for over 50 years, an apartment that the other residents of the building are convinced is haunted by its former resident, Felix Hessen, an artist who dabbled with the occult. What he finds within warps his mind and soul.After reading the journals, Apryl is determined to find out exactly what happened to her great aunt, even if it means putting herself in harm's way. Will Apryl be able to discover Barrington House's secret and what happened within Apartment 16, or will she become just another victim?Adam Neville weaves a tightly woven tale of mystery and the occult that is guaranteed to chill you. All the trappings of a typical haunted house tale are here, but Nevill warps it and takes it one step further, twisting it into something you don't expect. While I found some of it predictable, there was enough of a new twist to keep me reading. He has created characters that are believable in your typical horror story way in that you know the heroine isn't going to act in her best interest, but you fear for her anyway. Seth is a character you can sympathize with and hope that he can be redeemed before it's too late. Even the characters that you dislike on first meeting, the residents of Barrington House, become sympathetic as the story unfolds and you learn the horror they have lived with for the past 50 years.As much as I liked Apartment 16, I did have two issues with the book. My first issue was with the pacing of the novel. The first half moved with excruciating slowness, but there were just enough questions raised to keep me moving forward. It's like that long climb on a roller coaster. Once you pass the halfway point, it's down hill at warp speed to a satisfying conclusion that made the first half well worth the journey.My second issue was with Seth, as you never really know if an incident he keeps reliving in an event that actually happened to him when he was a child or if it is a memory planted by the powers of Barrington House. You get the impression it is an incident that he actually experienced, and if that is the case, he was destined for Barrington House from the time he was a child. It leaves you questioning long after you've put the book down.If you are a patient reader, I would highly recommend Adam Nevill's Apartment 16. It's a creepy tale that will have you looking over your shoulder and jumping when you catch a glimpse of something out of the corner of your eye.

This didnt just spark my interest, there are moments that dig in and whisper the way excellent, but disturbing, art does. Lovecraftian in that it hints at the unimaginable and leaves us to fill in our own unsettling visions.

“Her scream was short. Started deep. Went high, warbled, then ceased abruptly. This was followed by a loud snap, then a series of dry cracklings that put in mind the image of fresh celery being broken between strong hands. And of dry kindling being snapped to fit into a small fireplace.”In many ways a good haunted house story is much like a murder mystery with overt elements of the supernatural stirred into the concoction and Adam Nevil pours the enigmas into his haunted house novel, Apartment 16 (2010). To call Apartment 16 a haunted house novel, however, does the work a disservice because like Stephen King’s The Shining (1977) Nevill gives readers a haunted complex—in this case Barrington House, filled with forty, once upscale apartments spread through two blocks, in the fashionable area of London, Knightsbridge; a place that is “classic, flawless, and effortlessly exuded the sense of a long history.”Nevill’s story focuses mostly upon a small number of major characters. Foremost is twenty-eight year old Apryl Beckford who has traveled from America on her mother’s behalf to empty out and sell Apartment 39—bequeathed to Apryl and her mother from Apryl’s eighty-four year old deceased aunt, Lillian. Lillian: a widow who has never left her apartment for years in which “everything inside was ancient and faded and dusty,” who has never thrown away a thing and kept her drapes sewn shut; a woman whose “mental health hadn’t been good for a long time.” Instead of spending two weeks in London as planned, Apryl decides to “know everything there was to know about her great-aunt,” especially after discovering volumes of handwritten diaries which chronicle wild, incredible events… a woman increasingly fearing for her sanity—if not worse.Also of key interest is one of the young night porters at Barrington House, thirty-one year old would-be artist Seth “with two arts degrees to his name” driven by “desperation” to work at Barrington House and kept there by “despair.”Like a spider spinning its web around its victim, Nevill ensnares his reader quickly within the pages of Apartment 19 through the use of vivid and copious details and multiple, vague, little revelations of things that simply don’t feel right, all of which have an air of the inexplicable to them. Adding to the discoveries Apryl makes among the piles of what otherwise appear to be trash and the sensation that there is something else in the apartment other than that trash—flashes of things that cannot be clearly perceived, often streaks of red, out of the corner of her eye as well as her curiosity about her great-aunt’s death begins to become an obsession. Her captivation grows after reading about a mysterious figure referenced in her great-aunt’s diaries. Nevill ups the suspense when Apryl learns there are three people still living at Barrington House all of whom knew both Lillian and the man who, with each volume, takes on a greater significance in Lillian’s diaries but the three all are resolute: they refuse to speak to Apryl about what they know and how her great-aunt died.Nevil skillfully also surrounds Seth in an increasing dense fog of the unknown as a youthful, hooded character who usually clings to the shadows and whom no one else apparently can see or hear starts to appear to Seth, speaking to him about his future—a future that the youth—who Seth begins to think of as an ever present sentinel of sorts linked to Apartment 16—conveys to Seth includes he will begin to see things no one else can. More baffling, Seth’s fate appears to be tied to the dead man in Lillian’s diaries. As chapter after chapter flashes by, readers frighteningly realize that Seth’s character, personality, and perhaps his very grasp upon sanity is changing—and not to the better.Suspense and the chilling atmosphere created by the author pull the reader through increasingly bizarre events and scenarios in Apartment 16. Through his accomplished and carefully laid out prose and plotting, Nevil frequently creates scenes that produce an alarming sensation of choking claustrophobia.As times passes, it becomes clear that Apryl and Seth are not the sole focus of Apartment 16, but that there is a greater, evil figure behind the devastation of some of the lives in Barrington House—at least those that have not fled the facility: the presence of a deceased, “obscure European artist… and not a very wholesome one at that,” Felix Hessen. Most of his surreal, abstract, nightmarish art has disappeared and little is known about him. Hessen: a man who dabbled in the occult and came to believe that there is more than one world on earth and that other world is beyond hellish.Readers familiar with them are likely to recall two episodes from TV’s Thriller (hosted by the late Boris Karloff): “The Prisoner in the Mirror” and “The Hungry Glass” (1961) as well as Richard Matheson’s Hell House (1971) as Apryl and Seth’s lives transform and the two head toward a petrifying, aberrant collision with each other, the “sentinel,” and evil itself. Readers will find themselves helpless to do anything but grasp their copy of Apartment 16 tighter as they rapidly turn the pages seeking release from the miasma of evil and the surreal horrors that lurk behind the long locked doors and supposedly empty Apartment 16.The conclusion of Nevill’s novel is marked by horrifying events that come at breakneck speed and is the very personification of a nightmare. The novel will leave readers unpleasantly unnerved but also satisfied having enjoyed a well written and imaginative tale of the uncanny.

I think I might have hated this book. I'm not entirely sure yet. This is my second book by this author, and I'm starting to think I've made a mistake. Nevill alternates between a more traditional narrative and full blown disgustingly graphic phantasmagoria, and it never really works for me. I found myself reading Apryl's 'traditional' chapters, then skimming Seth's chapters because they seemed to exist for the sole purpose of depressing, disgusting, and confusing the reader. If you want to read depictions of the 'adult bits' of a bulbous dripping stinking hideous morbidly obese spider woman, then by all means go to town, this book is for you. I'd rather not. While we're on the topic, I've seen this brought up in reviews of The Ritual, but this author has a glaring tolerance deficit. He depicts overweight characters as shameful grotesqueries, immigrants as comic lotharios, and peoples his 'lower class' jobs and districts with Arabs, Africans, and the like. He's talented in some respects, to be sure, but I just don't think this type of horror is for me.

1 read in bed2 get a bit snoozy3 Wonder if I should put the book down4 keep reading5 decide I am too tired6 put book down, shut light off7 blink8 blink9 blink10 WHAT WAS THAT SOUND I'M NOT ALONE IN HERE THE DARKNESS IS ALIVE!!11 blink...repeatThis is a work of solid, creepy, nasty, slow unpleasantness. The author is painting emotions with words. I enjoyed the whole thing immensely!

Been meaning to read this one for a good long while, but for some reason it kept evading me. I wasn’t disappointed at all, it was one of the best of Adam Nevill for me, up there with “Last Days”. Like “Last Days” and “Under A Watchful Eye” this one deals more with the unseen world, a hellish place filled with lost, broken, evil souls. The gateway to this hell is locked away for safety behind the door of Apartment 16, a place previously (and currently) occupied by a painter obsessed with death, deformity and the occult.I often use the words slow burning with Adam Nevill because that’s essentially how the majority of his works play out, he sketches in the macabre and the evil creeping into our world, slowly revealing this ancient, featureless horrors that creak and ooze in only the darkest places. This one is definitely no different in that regard.The characters here were all pretty good, I’ve worked the night shift in dark old places like Seth and felt the feeling of being trapped working night shifts with little escape. So his side of the story and his descent into madness was interesting. The other main POV being Apryl from where we learn more of the historical background of the characters.All in all it was brilliant this one, also has some call backs to his first novel as well as some ideas ie puppets he would pick up on later down the line. Excellent and well worth a read.

So, what’s the song/ Well, Hotel California of course. You can check out any time you like but you can never leave. it’s a shabby building that’s seen better days and there’s something there you don’t want to see. It’s twisty and there are remnants of other novels in the text but still, it’s a dark sort of book. Can’t say any of the characters are exactly pleasant but they are what they are and they are who they are and that’s all there is to it. So, that’s how the other half lives then. No, it’s a good book actually. I read it in one sitting simply because I wanted to see how it ended and what happened. Did April survive. well, read it and find out.

Apartment 16 is a novel largely set in an exclusive block of apartments in London. The lead character, Apryl, inherits the apartment and arrives to find Barrington House a strange place full of eccentric inhabitants, dark secrets, and rooms with prohibited access.The story follows the parallel lives of Apryl and Seth, one of the night-staff at the hotel, whose paths don't generally cross. As Apryl delves into her Great Aunt's history and the building's past and begins to unearth strange secrets, she attempts to find the truth from some of the elderly and cantankerous inhabitants of the apartment that knew her Great Aunt. Meanwhile Seth is lured to Apartment 16 by strange nocturnal noises, and eventually starts having visions and conversations with a mysterious hooded boy, before succumbing to an almost possessed art-frenzy, in the style of a Hieronymus Bosch-esqe painter called Hessen who used to live in the apartment.As their stories begin to come together, Apryl joining a small fanatical almost cult-like group of Hessen appreciators, and Seth converting the walls of his bedsit into a grotto of Hessen imagery, it begins to become clear that what lies in the depths of Apartment 16 that keeps the building's occupants prisoners and slowly drives them mad, is a nightmare of Lovecraftian proportions.Apartment 16 is a well-written and well paced book that remains pretty original despite clear nods to some works that have gone before it involving buildings and pictures with portals: Lovecraft's " The Picture in the House " and " The Dreams in the Witch House " are two, and films like " Toolbox Murders " with magic-working runes disguised as art painted on each level (itself a film carrying references to Polanski's " The Tenant " whose protagonist is driven crazy by the building's eccentric occupants).The claustrophobia of the building and its ability to prevent occupants from traveling too far away are vividly portrayed and the book genuinely has a dark, dismal, and sinister feel about it and finishes with a nice twist about another character in the story, and that Lovecraftian note of futility; that some of the story's characters have merely had a lucky escape from something malevolent and much more powerful than them. The Picture in the HouseThe Dreams in the Witch HouseToolbox MurdersThe Tenant

The prologue hooked me in completely, it gave me the chills. And for the first third of the book that sense of fear and creepiness carried over well. I read the first few chapters in the book before I went to sleep and had a nightmare about it, it was great. I enjoyed seeing two faces of London, one from Apryl's view and one from Seth's, one sees something amazing, the other sees something much darker.Unfortunately, once the writer goes into great detail of the horror, the descriptions can get too much or too confusing or both and that causes it to lose a lot of the fear factor, and sometimes you need to re-read over several of his passages to makes sense of it. I think this is a story, with all the descriptions, would have work better if it was communicated through a visual media like film rather than in book form.The middle loses a lot of pacing. Some scenes could have been shortened or even omitted. Once scene, with the Hessen's fan club really led to nowhere, it didn't add to the creepiness.There was also too much revealed too soon, too many times the creature flashed in the corner of your eye that you got desensitised to it and it became mundane by the end of the book.As for the ending, it didn't feel like an ending, it stopped far too abruptly for me, as if the writer didn't know how to end it properly, all this build up leads to something that is over very quickly, which left you unfilled by the final encounter. And I like happy endings, sad endings, endings where the good guys win and ending where the bad guys win but I wasn't a fan of this ending. It was unfulfilling.Basically, it's a book that had a great, strong start, lots of promise, but slowed down and ended weakly.

This started off a really good read,but unfortunately about halfway through it started to drag; the explanations of the things going on in the porters mind, who was being pulled into the happenings in apartment sixteen, for me, became too involved and some times i felt some of it un-neccessary and too long drawn out- pages of how he was feeling, i like stories to have a faster pace.Having said that, i did want to carry on reading, and i didnt find it difficult to work out what was going on.Obviously there was a presence with evil intent not only in the apartment but it had followed some of the inhabitants of the building outside and had great influence on them all,who it was and what it wanted was brought to light by a young American girl,who had come to sort out the apartment of her relative whom she had never met but had bequeathed the property to her.T he last few chapters did pick up and the ending was action packed and not so good for some of the characters,i liked this book, but only after i had finished and thought about it. it is a shame i just had that glitch in the middle,where i nearly put it down and didnt pick it up again,probably many readers will feel that what i thought was too much explanation, they will find quite in order.