Last Days

December 3, 2012
Nevill (The Ritual) pulls out all the stops in this audacious literary take on metafictional horror films like The Blair Witch Project. British filmmaker Kyle Freeman is on his last financial legs when he’s offered a deal that sounds too good to be true: £100,000 to help Max Solomon, publisher of the hot self-help book of the moment, make a documentary about a cult. In 1975, nine people were found dead at the headquarters of the Temple of the Last Days in an abandoned mine in Arizona. Among the corpses was Sister Katherine, the founder of the temple, beheaded at her own request. Freeman, who’s given a tight schedule to complete the project, soon gets the feeling that supernatural forces are at work—and that his producer has been less than forthcoming. Fans of films about haunted places, otherworldly beings, and rituals gone terribly wrong will find this homage deliciously chilling.

December 1, 2012
Something wicked this way comes in Nevill's (The Ritual, 2012, etc.) modern horror tale. Kyle Freeman is a respected but deep-in-debt London-based documentary filmmaker. Contacted by Max Solomon, a prosperous New-Age publisher, Freeman's asked to make a film about The Temple of the Last Days, a 1960-1970s hippie-era cult that is an autocratic semireligious lifestyle stew of everything from Scientology to Buddhism, at least until it culminated in mass murder in Arizona. Solomon has prearranged travel and script, and he pressures Freeman to agree immediately. The fact the fee is 100,000 makes quick acquiescence easy. The fact that Solomon himself originated the cult's predecessor group, The Last Gathering, is kept secret. Solomon meant well, only wanting to "create one small pocket of cooperation and decency." That lasted until Sister Katherine assumed leadership. Katherine, sociopathic daughter of a down-and-out aristocrat, had spent time in prison for running a brothel. Freeman, along with cameraman Dan, travels to sites of the cult's activity, from Clarendon Road to Normandy to Arizona and back to London, meeting warped witnesses to the paranormal. At each site, Freeman himself experiences apparitions and manifestations, enough to provoke hallucinogenic nightmares. Only after Freeman visits Antwerp and examines an ancient triptych painted by Niclaes Verhulst does he comprehend that the skeletal demons who have manifested through walls intent on mayhem--demons that he has experienced at each site and at his apartment--can be traced to the Blood Friends, ghosts of followers of an Anabaptist heretic, Konrad Lorche, leader of a 16th-century religious commune. After Lorche declared himself God's one king and fed a French bishop to a pig, he and his followers were besieged, captured, and burned alive or beheaded--only to linger in some hellish purgatory to await remanifestation. Neville's writing is deft and believable. Tension abounds, right up to a long, bloody denouement at Sister Katherine's luxurious California mansion, where the Blood Friends await rejuvenation. Obsession and megalomania, sex and power make for a sophisticated, literate and well-crafted paranormal horror.

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Starred review from January 1, 2013

Nevill's (The Ritual) latest horror masterpiece follows two guerilla documentary filmmakers in their quest to create a groundbreaking piece of cinema. The Temple of the Last Days cult will forever live in infamy. Led by the disturbed and powerful Sister Katherine, the cult flourished in Europe and the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1975 Sister Katherine was found decapitated among the bodies of her followers in a heinous mass suicide. But is Sister Katherine really gone from this earth? Kyle and Dan are determined to expose the cult's cabalistic side on film, but as they talk to those involved in the case and their documentary footage unfolds, the filmmakers encounter supernatural phenomena that endanger their lives. VERDICT This exceptional macabre tale stuns in its ability to inspire abject, primal terror. Readers will lose all hope of undisturbed, peaceful sleep. Highly recommended.--Amy M. Davis, Parmley Billings Lib., MT

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2013
Horror fans will revel in this appropriately chilling tale of modern-day murder and mayhem that stretches back several centuries. When financially strapped documentarian Kyle Freeman is offered a huge fee to make a film about the Temple of the Last Days, a warped, paranoid cult whose members ended their own days in a bloodbath in an abandoned mine in Arizona, he jumps at the opportunity. As he moves about several countries in search of authentic locations, credible interviews, and the appalling truths behind the myth of the cult, he himself begins to experience some shocking, otherworldly events. Becoming a subject of his own research and filming, Freeman sees his nightmarish journey deepen the further he delves into the twisted history of the cult and its participants. This appropriately ghastly tale definitely lives up to its billing as a Blair Witch Projectstyle novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)