Banquet for the Damned (2004) is what happens when you take the Scottish town of St Andrews and lay over it Casting the Runes by MR James. Though there are many nods to the James story the novel works on a much larger canvas. Think twenty pages versus five hundred more.

Set in the late 90s, St Andrews feels ripe for this type of story: dusty institutions, an occult past, a place by the sea. Barring a few walk-on parts for locals,the cast – a couple of stoner musicians from Birmingham looking to make a concept album; an American anthropologist investigating localised cases of night terrors worldwide; and already in situ an old academic cum alchemist from the Oxbridge mould – isn’t from around here.

The main thrust of the tale is that academic Eliot Caldwell once wrote the eponymous occult book many years before and while Dante and Tom, our Brummie musicians are here to meet him to discuss their album, there are far stranger things afoot – weird dreams and student deaths – that have brought the anthropologist to town. Could they all be connected? Well, yes.

As horror novels go it veers toward the supernatural thriller end of the scale, even with its slow burn pace. Nevill has clearly tapped into the atmospheric palette of literary forebears like Blackwood, Machen, and James (whom he acknowledges) and while he sustains the sense of dread, impressive given the book’s length, there are some flabby moments and prolonged exposition that could have been dropped in more interesting ways.

The ultimate problem, as I find with many a horror, is how to conclude. Short stories in the genre can be left ambiguous, unexplained, and continue to haunt. But with the novel there’s typically a sense that all the threads need to be neatly tied up. This is where the book is at its lowest. The pace escalates, action trumps atmosphere, and the conclusion is unsatisfying. While the book is Nevill’s first horror (he cut his teeth in erotica) it certainly shows promise and I’ll try more.