![]() He's writing a definitive history of British popular culture, battling penury and swimming through the doldrums after the break-up of his marriage. The genre favours supermen over the ordinary man in the street, proactive heroes over lonely, socially awkward souls, but one of the many delights of Barnett's fourth novel is its put-upon hero, Stuart Balfour. PopCULT! by David Barnett (Pendragon Press, £9.99) Best of all, though, is his depiction of the elemental forces of evil that haunt the hostile arctic wastelands. ![]() ![]() Nevill is excellent at characterisation, and evokes the terror and despair experienced by the quartet with heart-stopping fidelity. Then the lone survivor is rescued by the members of a black metal band, and things start to get seriously weird. When they take a wrong turning in the forest and find themselves lost, tempers begin to fray and hostilities surface – and something bestial picks them off one by one and leaves their eviscerated corpses hanging in trees. Phil and Dom are outwardly rich, successful and happily married expedition leader Hutch is a pragmatic Yorkshireman, and Luke, the outsider, a bit of a social failure. ![]() ![]() Four college friends, now in their mid 30s, head to the north of Sweden for a spot of cathartic trekking. This novel grabs from the very first page, refuses to be laid aside, and carries the hapless reader, exhausted and wrung out, to the very last sentence. The Ritual, by Adam Nevill (Macmillan, £12.99) ![]()
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