Cunning Folk

By: Adam Nevill

Narrated by: Peter Walters

Length: 12 hrs and 1 min

Publisher's summary

A compelling folk-horror story of deadly rivalry and the oldest magic from the author of The Ritual, The Reddening, No One Gets Out Alive and the four times winner of The August Derleth Award for Best Horror Novel.

No home is heaven with hell next door.

Money's tight and their new home is a fixer-upper. Deep in rural South West England, with an ancient wood at the foot of the garden, Tom and his family are miles from anywhere and anyone familiar. His wife, Fiona, was never convinced that buying the money-pit at auction was a good idea. Not least because the previous owner committed suicide. Though no one can explain why.

Within days of crossing the threshold, when hostilities break out with the elderly couple next door, Tom's dreams of future contentment are threatened by an escalating tit-for-tat campaign of petty damage and disruption.

Increasingly isolated and tormented, Tom risks losing his home, everyone dear to him, and his mind. Because, surely, only the mad would suspect that the oddballs across the hedgerow command unearthly powers. A malicious magic even older than the eerie wood and the strange barrow therein. A hallowed realm from where, he suspects, his neighbours draw a hideous power.

“Adam Nevill excels at making nightmares real.” (Guardian)

“Nevill has crafted some of the tensest scariest horror this reviewer has read in years.” (SFX)

©2021 Adam Nevill (P)2021 Ritual Limited

Slow, but Descriptive

A little wordsy, but a good read. Took me a lot longer to finish it than I thought it would as I am interested in most stories like this. I felt the ending felt a little…hurried. But overall a good read.

Frustrating ...

You know how, in horror movies, no one believes the person who actually knows what's going on until the final act of the film? You know how frustrating that old trope can be? Well, this is the book form of that.

(And I'm not sure if I just got a wonky copy, but the recording isn't very crisp.)

Story was gripping, narration was grating

The narrator on this is pretty painful. All the voices he does are weird and creaky, but his female voices are just awful - like scratchy, squeaky cartoons. And he kept mispronouncing ordinary words like “abyss” and “decade”. Given that the prose is already pretty overblown, it added a level of awkwardness and distraction that robbed the story of a lot of its impact.

Adam Nevill Strikes Again

This is another great horror novel by Nevill. Old gods and original ideas converge in his novels in ways that always leave me a bit stunned at the end. Love it

Fantastic and Terrifying

After No One Gets Out Alive, I didn’t think Nevill’s books were for me, but I was so interested in the concept for this one that had to give it a try.

I think this one worked for me because it was a lot shorter and stuck to one part.

As usual, Neville has a way for making me connect to his characters and hate anyone who does them wrong. I didn’t really like Tom at first and he made some stupid choices, but he really came around when he needed to and went to huge lengths to fight for his family.

As for his family…I loved Gracie, the four-year-old who always believed in her Daddy, but Fiona, his wife, really got on my nerves. It wasn’t that she was a bad person, but certain circumstances put her character in the worst light and that was never redeemed enough for me.

As for the elderly neighbors, they made excellent villains and were pretty terrifying in their indifference to some of the most horrific situations. That said, Nevill gave them a humanity at times that made me actually wonder if they were all bad.

I loved the plot in this, the backstories, and all the details about what was really going on. My absolute favorite scene was when Tom meets Blackwood, who decides to help him defeat his neighbors…for a price, of course.

My only real criticism is that the detail got a little too much at times and distracted from the meat of the story. That said, the last 10 chapters absolutely killed it and blew me away, leaving me guessing to the final page.

Great story but

Narrator is very miscast - just way too old to be able to read most of the characters (especially female) convincingly. Some weird audio hissing too on headphones.

loved it.

Nevill has a fantastic talent for taking the ancient world, the things that we have forgotten about, and bringing them backup to the surface. He has an excellent talent for having his characters come unraveled at things that would pull a person's threads apart.

Great book.

I wish I would have actually read this one

The story and premise are great and I really enjoyed the book overall. However, the narrator was sometimes hard to listen to and the audio quality was poor for whatever reason making me wish I would have just purchased and read the book myself.

derisive amd unspectacular

this book was hard to finish although I will say the second half definitely held my attention better than the first. it feels as though because of the fame of his earlier novel the ritual Adam was trying to write something along the same lines of folk horror but this one just seems unimaginative. there are good elements to it and I didn't enjoy certain aspects but there are a lot of better reads

Slowly chilling

The first half of the book is slow and primarily introspective of the characters. The supernatural elements start subtle enough to be doubted. The second half becomes gory very quickly, The plot holds together with Tom’s deteriorating stability and the revealed supernatural happenings. But read with caution if gory horror isn’t your normal reading.