In particular, after Kat is introduced and after Helene is introduced we spend an inordinate amount of time listening to their respective ruminations.

The first half of this book didn’t grip me. He speaks of locals in on some conspiracy, and Kat is loath to take him seriously. The formerly athletic young man is haggard and paranoid. Six years after Matt’s discovery of the dig Kat goes back to talk to him, and he’s greatly changed. Helene finds CDs of recordings from her brother, Lincoln, who supposedly killed himself six years earlier (but the body was never found). Kat, a lifestyle journalist, keeps having nightmares triggered by the exhibition of items from the dig site, and her boyfriend Steve becomes overly interested in a local musician, Willows, whom he believes is running drugs. Shelly and Greg go camping by the shore and are beaten to death by naked people painted red. Meanwhile, a man gets lost on a walk through South Devon and finds a farmhouse occupied by two people who are naked and painted red. They found female skeletons interred with reverence, painted red, and called them the Red Queens. The academicians who go in to study the place confirm that cannibalism took place there: 60,000 years BC, 45,000 years BC, and 13,000 years ago–all the way back to the Neanderthals. Nevill’s The Reddening: A Folk-Horror Thriller introduces us to an unusual find that a paraglider, Matt, found: a stretch of cliff crumbled, revealing caves and many, many bones.

Adam nevill the reddening