Before You Wake: Three Horrors by Adam L. G Nevill

Rating : 3/5
Read between 22nd, feb 2018 and 23rd, Feb 2018
Edition Details:
Format : E-Book
Page Count: 67
Publisher: Ritual Limited
ASIN:B074PXKW4L
This is a collection of three horror stories by Adam L.G. Nevill. The stories are:

1. The Angles of London 3/5
First Sentence:
Still a little surprised such things were tolerated in the city, Frank stared at the mess.

Frank had come to London to become an actor. But fate had something else in store for him. He was stuck  in a crappy apartment and doing a job that was not paying well. Added to it was his landlord who was always ready to harass him.

When the landlord decides to arbitrarily raise the rent, Franks thinks enough is enough. This is extortion and Frank has decided that he’ll not succumb to this exploitation. He has decided to stand up to his landlord.

He was not a pushover and he’ll tell this to his landlord. But his neighbour advises him not to do that. He tells him it’s not in his best interests to confront the landlord.

Why did the neighbour advised Frank to bend to the landlord’s will? What did Frank do? What happened next.

It was a good story. I liked the premise and the twist in the end. I had not expected that.

2.Always in our hearts 3/5

First Sentence:
I could quickly turn on a wet road,fail to execute an emergency stop in time when a child runs into the road… 

Ray Larch is a taxi driver. When he’s asked to meet a guy for a fare he doesn’t thinks it’s something out of ordinary. He just has to make few stops. It’s regular fare for him. Or is it?

It was a good story that maintains the mystery till the end. Although, i could guess the main ending but still i had to know how it would be achieved.   I also liked the part where the main character broods about the traffic and how these are just accidents waiting to happen. A slight miscalculation and you’d just lose your life and some one else’s too. This particular thought resonated with me. I walk to my office and i often think about that. You don’t know who’s behind the wheel and whether he’s capable of driving or not. You could be following the rules but what are the chances that the other guy is too. This thought is really scary.

Few lines from the story that i liked:

We drive because we forget, he decided. We forget pain, we forget fear, we forget the hot-cold paralysis of near misses, we forget consequences. We forget our vulnerability; the very fragility of our bodies.

Just as you never really knew what was going on behind a face, you had also no idea what a home really looked like behind the facade.

3. Hippocampus 3.5/5
First Sentence:
Walls of water as slow as lava, black as coal, push the freighter up mountainsides, over frothing peaks and into plunging descents.

A freighter is floating in the middle of the sea. It seems abandoned or is it. The writer is willing to take you to this freighter. The question is, Are you ready to accompany him?

It was a different story. The reader is taken to the aftermath of an incident that has happened on the sea. As you go along you can gauge what would have happened. This aspect of the story where you have to think what must have occurred there to cause such mayhem made it more scarier for me. If you have good imagination, you’d definitely create some scary scenario for yourselves. 


In totality i enjoyed the stories in the collection. I think they can be read once. They have piqued my interest in other works of the author and i would definitely look into them.

If you have read this books then do comment what did you think about it. And if you want to read the book then you can get it from the following links:

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About विकास नैनवाल 'अंजान'

विकास नैनवाल को अलग अलग तरह के विषयों पर उन्हें लिखना पसंद है। एक बुक जर्नल नाम से एक वेब पत्रिका और दुईबात नाम से वह अपनी व्यक्तिगत वेबसाईट का संचालन भी करते हैं।

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