Some Will Not Sleep: Selected Horrors (2016) by Adam Nevill

Weird, indeterminate, and macabre stories

Readers unfamiliar with Some Will Not Sleep may prefer to read these notes only after reading the collection.

The first four short stories collected in Some Will Not Sleep are executed at a fever-dream tempo of horror-intoxicated ostranenie. Readers who appreciate the short fiction of Ramsey Campbell and Mark Samuels will enjoy these finely-wrought achievements.

"Where Angels Come In" (2005) is a coming-of-age story narrated by a boy who joined his friend -- the now vanished classmate Pickering -- in trespassing a forbidden building.

        For years, we talked about going up there. All the kids do, and Pickering, Ritchie and me wanted to be the bravest boys in our school. We wanted to break in there and come out with treasure for proof that we’d been inside, and not just looked in through the gate like all the others we knew. Some people say the white house on the hill was once a place where old, rich people lived after they retired from owning the industry, the land, the laws, our houses, our town, us. Others say the building was built on an old well and that the ground is contaminated. A teacher told us the mansion used to be a hospital and is still full of germs. Our dad said the house was an asylum for lunatics that closed down over a hundred years ago, and has stayed empty ever since, because it’s falling to pieces and is too expensive to repair. That’s why kids should never go there: you could be crushed by bricks or fall through a floor. Nana Alice says it’s a place ‘where angels come in’. But we all know that it’s the place where the missing things are. Every street in our town has lost pets and knows a family who’s lost a child. And every time the police search the big house they find nothing. No one remembers the big gate being open.

"The Original Occupant" begins with a narrative voice redolent of the "pleasing terror" period of UK horror fiction.