The Ritual

“I don’t think people are supposed to come here.”

This is an ominous statement by Luke shortly before the nightmares and killings of his friends begin. After seeing the mutilated animal and finding the black house, Luke only wants to retreat back to the trails, out of the virgin forest. This develops the theme of The Clash Between Modernity and Ancient Beliefs—the creature that haunts and harms them only has power in the wilderness.

“My name is Luke and I am on the floor.”

This is when Luke wakes up from his nightmare in the black house, and the only time Nevill uses the first person. In the preceding nightmare, Nevill uses the second person, and the first person indicates that Luke’s dream has ended. For the majority of the novel, Nevill uses the close third person.

“But he was not to be brought out of this trembling mad place until something snapped him out of it.”

This is the moment when Luke and Dom get into a physical fight and another example of Nevill beginning a sentence with a conjunction. Luke can’t be persuaded to stop assaulting Dom for a little while, which develops the theme of The Complicated Nature of Anger. Luke is misplacing his anger on Dom; his anger is only useful in the life-or-death situations that the creature and the Norwegians put him in.

“And the woods look like the bristling surface of an army, with lances, standards and great armoured backs rising out of a dark mass, once seething forward and now frozen as if a terrible march or retreat has been suspended.”

Here, shortly before Hutch is taken and killed, the forest is compared to enemy forces, foreshadowing the threat the men will soon face. This represents the conflict between modernity and ancient beliefs: The virgin forest is where supernatural forces, like the goat/human creature, can defeat humans.

“It’s trying to tell you something. It is letting you know that you can wait for it here and watch it come fast from the trees, or you can try to run on slow and strengthless legs. Flee out there, through the spikes and snares of ungroomed woodland.”

This is an example of how Nevill uses the second person in dreams. It is a way of trying to involve the reader, making the text more intimate, and setting it apart from the characters’ waking lives. This is part of Luke’s dream that occurs while Hutch is attacked by the creature; he, and the reader, are passive observers of the violence.

“The tent now reminded him of a great kite that had smashed to earth.”

Shortly before this, Luke thought the tent looked like a ship in the ocean of forest, which is part of the overarching symbolism of the ocean. Here, Hutch’s tent looks like a destroyed toy because he is simply a toy for the creature to kill and crucify. In the forest, humans are reduced to mere playthings.

“Somewhere within the mad euphoria that propelled him out there to stab and hack, to slash, to bellow, to not think or care in the reddish place a man can inhabit, he heard his name being called repeatedly by Dom and Phil. Their voices drew him back into himself and he lost momentum, entertained doubt. But he grew hot with rage again and shouted so he could stay within the place he needed to be to face anything, anything at all.”

Luke tries to fight the creature after it kills Hutch. Part of the complicated nature of anger is that anger can give Luke the confidence to fight any enemy, as he experiences a cortisol spike that prepares the brain for combat. While his anger is destructive in urban environments and his interpersonal relationships, it becomes a constructive asset in the forest during his battles of self-defense with the creature.

“They were almost part of it now. Just a few bright colours of the manmade fibres they wore marketed them out as any different to the thoughtless, relentless decay of season and nature.”

Phil, Dom, and Luke are covered in the dirt and smell of the forest, unable to bathe, far from civilization. Their human identities are formed and maintained in the urban landscape of London, represented by the fabrics manufactured by humans. These are torn apart by nature, the land where the creature holds all the power, in part, by taking humans’ unique identity from them and treating them just like any other large animal. This passage reinforces the clash between modernity and ancient beliefs in the forest.

“Nothing would follow him out there; it didn’t like to be seen, he told himself. It crept about the ruins and relics of a former time.”

Luke is able to see the path to civilization after climbing a tree, and Skaite is a place where the creature will not roam. The supernatural creature only has power in untouched nature, making it permanently outside of the hierarchies of life in civilization.

“There was no Phil on their hill.”

While Luke gets the lay of the land in the tree on the hill, the creature takes and kills Phil. Nevill’s internally rhyming sentence alludes to the children’s rhyme about Jack and Jill going up a hill. He uses a horror trope of twisting the childlike into something sinister.

“None of us knew what life would throw at us. Everyone is fucked up, Luke. Damaged. We’re all messed up, underneath. Doesn’t matter what kind of house you live in.”

In this quote, Dom compares his and Luke’s lives, which represent different kinds of Masculinity In and Out of Civilization. Dom has a family home that is being divided in a divorce, and Luke has a bachelor pad. Neither the masculine path of the family man nor the bachelor turn out to produce lasting happiness, suggesting the tensions and unattainable societal standards for masculinity.

“And Dom was so close to him now, the presence of his bulk was tangible at Luke’s back. But god he stank. Even though his nose and mouth were full of dry blood, Luke could smell Dom’s heavy breath and sweat-saturated clothes.”

Here, Luke thinks that Dom is walking behind him, but the creature has killed Dom and taken his place walking behind Luke. The smell is a hint that Luke, who can’t look behind him easily because of a head injury, is wrong about who he senses. He has a feeling of wrongness without knowing the truth about what is wrong, which is a common horror trope.

“He was dying of thirst in his ignorance of where it collected on the ground.”

After realizing Dom is gone, Luke focuses on trying to survive. He has no water and tries drinking rain off leaves, but struggles to get more than a couple drops. If he had learned survival skills, which are a different kind of masculinity in and out of civilization than his London upbringing, he would have an easier time alone in the wilderness.

“He squinted his good eye at the ocean of space and scarlet light beyond the trees. And he wondered if this was the end of the terrible forest, or the beginning of hell, or just the end of his mind.”

Luke here collapses after all his friends have died. The passage develops the symbolism of the ocean, as he is lost in a world that is inhospitable to humans. He is not sure of his physical location or even of his mental equilibrium, which unnerves him.

“Your will is strong, Luke.”

Loki says this to Luke after he tries to escape. At the heart of Luke’s character is stubbornness. He refuses to die, and refuses to capitulate before the black metal teens, the old woman, or the creature. His will, and his rage, keep him alive, speaking to the complicated nature of anger.

“And for the first time since he had been at school, Luke prayed. The enormity of what existed in this place made him think in those terms. In epic terms of gods and devils, and in the terms of magic and the great incomprehensible age that had swept through here and left such terrible things behind.”

This passage develops the theme of the clash between modernity and ancient beliefs. The creature and its supernatural power thrives in the wilderness. Luke doesn’t pray as an adult in London, where the creature holds no sway; modern civilization has denied the existence of god and the devil, but in the forest such ancient ideas spring back to life.

“Evil was, he decided, inevitable, relentless and predictable. Imaginative, he’d give it that much, but soulless.”

Luke considers the evil nature of Loki, Fenris, and Surtr, which is similar to the evil nature of the creature. The evil in the wilderness reflects a part of civilization. People who are raised with social norms and reject them can commit violence that is similar to the violence of a supernatural, wild creature.

“What happened to you eventually was just more extreme out here; that was the only difference to being ground down by increments in the other world he had failed at and had now departed for good. The possibilities for destruction here were not so different in any other place; they just took different forms. Nor was the intent for violence any different here; it was everywhere he had ever lived.”

Here, Luke contrasts evil in the forest with evil in society, adding a new dimension to masculinity in and out of civilization. In society, some people are slowly destroyed by emptiness and monotony; in the forest, people are quickly destroyed by the creature. Beyond this, the motivations for violence are similar.

“He mattered as much as livestock. He was important, he was valued, but only for the sustenance of other older appetites.”

In this passage, Luke considers why the old woman treats him warmly. She treats her sacrifice to the creature in a somewhat humane fashion, like free-range eggs or free-range beef. This diminishes the boundaries between humans and animals.

“But its rule was over, it was endangered. An isolated God by the sign of the cross, its idolatry rotted in forgotten attics now, and about it false prophets and ragged messiahs gathered.”

This passage develops the symbolism of the cross. Luke considers how the Christian church, symbolized by the cross, took precedence in human society and pushed old gods, like Odin and the creature, to the wilderness. The cross has the power to banish pagan spirits and gods to the virgin forest, supporting the theme of the clash between modernity and ancient beliefs.

“And upon the largest stones around him, his dead friends grimace silently in death. Naked and devoured down to their blood-blackened bones, they are tied to stones carved with forgotten poems.”

Nevill uses the third person (he/him) in this dream sequence. He does this a couple times toward the end of the novel, closing the grammatical gap he established between the dream world and the waking world earlier. It keeps the reader at arm’s length, unlike the second person that he previously used. Instead, it is the use of present tense that creates a sense of immediacy in the passage, as if what is happening in Luke’s dream is occurring in real time.

“He was operating on instinct now. But where did these instincts come from?”

Luke instinctively knows how to hurt and kill his captors, despite never being trained for combat. He is operating from an animal fight-or-flight response. This is another moment when the boundaries between human and animal are dissolved, and when the complicated nature of anger becomes a more constructive force in his life.

“Against his stomach and groin, he felt a nose; as wet as seafood and contracting like a baby’s heart in his navel.”

This is the final face off between Luke and the goat/human creature. It develops the ocean symbolism with the “seafood” wetness of the creature’s nose. This passage also builds on the horror trope of making things from childhood sinister with the reference to the “baby’s heart.”