Again with the troubling questions. Is author Adam Nevill secretly part of a warped cult, here to dissuade us from taking out-of-body adventures? Does he hold hidden knowledge, transmitted to him telepathically by an ancient Tibetan horror fan? Or is he a guy who writes stuff, like any mortal shell? One day we hope to interview him and find out (though possibly not, after he’s read this)…
Yes, Adam Nevill’s latest novel, Under a Watchful Eye, is out now. We’ll say more about it later, but first we must consider the silver cord – and Venus.
For Watchful Eye is very much about out-of-body experiences, and we can’t escape the various forays we’ve made into such matters on greydogtales recently (see h p lovecraft and the lords of venus for example).
N.B. If you can’t be bothered to follow our convoluted threads, the proper Watchful Eye bit comes later. There’ll be a headline. But shame on you.
A Plumber on Venus
We shall explain. Our first experience of the silver cord was many years ago in the books of T Lobsang Rampa, AKA Cyril Hoskin, the English plumber who said he was ‘possessed’ by the spirit of a Tibetan monk. Out-of-body experiences pervade Rampa’s work. We even tried to astral project in those awkward teenage years, having read some of his books. Apperantly our own mortal shell is rather possessive, because we didn’t get anywhere. Not even into Dad’s drinks cabinet.
Here’s T Lobsang on the subject, from his book You – Forever:
“The body here on Earth is something like a vehicle operating by remote control. The driver is the Overself. You may have seen a child’s toy car, which is connected, to the child by a long flexible cable. The child can press a button and make the car go forward, or make it stop or go back, and by turning a wheel on this flexible cable the car can be steered. The human body may be likened very, very roughly to that, for the Overself which cannot come down to the Earth to gain experiences, sends down this body which is US on Earth. Everything that we experience, everything that we do or think or hear – travels upwards to be stored in the memory of the Overself.”
“(The) Silver Cord connects us to our Overself in much the same way as the umbilical cord (navlestreng) connects a baby to its mother. The umbilical cord is a very intricate device, a very complex affair indeed, but it is as a piece of string compared to the complexity of the Silver Cord. This Cord is a mass of molecules rotating over an extremely wide range of frequencies, but it is an intangible thing – so far as the human body is concerned. The molecules are too widely dispersed for the average human sight to see it.
“Many animals can see it, because animals see on a different range of frequencies – and hear on a different range of frequencies than humans. Dogs, as you know, can be called by a “silent” dog whistle, silent because a human cannot hear it – but a dog easily can. In the same way, animals can see the Silver Cord and the aura, because both these vibrate on a frequency which is just within the receptivity of an animal’s sight. With practice it is quite easily possible for a human to extend the band of receptivity (mottakelighet) of their sight, in much the same way as a weak man, by practice and by exercise, can lift a weight which normally would be far far beyond his physical capabilities.”
You – Forever (1965)
This concept of an earthly form and a higher, astral one (or atma), bound by a silver cord, has become a relatively common one, though few may know its origins. One suggestion is that the term ‘silver cord’ originally comes from the Bible, in Ecclesiastes:
“Remember him—before the silver cord is severed, or the golden bowl is broken; before the pitcher is shattered at the spring, or the wheel broken at the well, and the dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.”
The interpretation of this is difficult, because it’s possible that Ecclesiastes refers quite tangibly to the silver chain holding up a ritual golden bowl of oil in temples. But it’s a good image, and the silver cord comes up in many mystical works and theories.
If we pop into Under a Watchful Eye for a moment, not only are there numerous mentions of the silver cord, but also of figures which shuffle around, having a vestigial stump on their abdomens. The silver cord cut or snapped; the psychic body lost from its natural connection forever. It’s an aspect which is considered at length in the book, with ominous implications.
And we would have gone straight to our quasi-review at this point, except that we remembered something else, the short book My Visit to Venus. Not originally authorised by Rampa/Hoskin, it was produced in the sixties (?) from earlier material, and cobbled together by Gray Barker (1925-84), a most curious man.
Barker was either a ufologist, or a sceptic using belief in UFOs to make a fast buck, according to who you believe. He is credited as the origin of the Men in Black, and wrote about the Mothman phenomenon before it achieved later fame.
Some Rampa followers feel that Venus was another cynical way to make money. Barker’s foreword, which includes the sentence ‘We predict that it will be much sought after, and that once this original edition is gone it will become a prize collector’s item.’ doesn’t help. It’s not very interesting, by the way, or illuminating – a brief thing, with some bad illustrations:
“To one side was a green covered table, and around it there were what appeared to be a group of golden thrones in which a group of men sat. Soon we were in telepathic communion with the group, the Lords of Venus, the controllers of that particular sphere of activity.”
My Visit to Venus
But how could we resist yet another mention of the Lords of Venus?
Now, that proper book…
Into the Eye of Adam
Adam Nevill has had huge and deserved success in the last few years, producing a series of original horror novels which have caught the imagination of thousands. Under a Watchful Eye, his latest book, is a book full of twists and turns, some of them suspected, many of them surprising.
We’re not going to say it’s his best, because frankly we were too taken by his award-winning novel Last Days, which is hard to beat. The issue with Last Days is that it introduced some images which stay with you, so we can’t tell if we’re being fair or not when we compare books. The Blood Friends of Last Days are unforgettable, one of the great creations of the last few years’ horror.
There should be action figures available, is what we’re saying.
Watchful Eye is very much a Nevill book, intertwining various dark themes, and consciously references aspects of his other work. Indeed, the cult concept from Last Days gets a glancing mention, as does Sister Katherine, which pleased us, and the early part of the book is partly a re-exploration of an earlier story, “Yellow Teeth”, which appeared in his collection Some Will Not Sleep last year. As he says in his notes to Some Will Not Sleep, “Yellow Teeth” draws on a troubled personal time:
“…my living arrangements, and my personal standards, were often severely compromised by having very little money and working at night. This forced me to live in some shoddy places and to cohabit with, quite frankly, people with the most appalling habits, who may even have been suffering from personality disorders. That whole period was a maelstrom of sleep deprivation, poverty, despair, conflict with others within small living spaces, and grave anxieties about my future.”
Some Will Not Sleep (2016)
A visitor with appalling habits, foreshadowed in “Yellow Teeth”, dominates the first part of Under a Watchful Eye, and does bring you a sense of disgust and frustration. It doesn’t matter if you read the short story first, nor does either piece spoil the other.
Watchful Eye goes much further in examining the themes involved, and introduces new directions. Once again Nevill draws on a sense of past follies and madness, neo-Jamesian threats combined with obsessive psychical and spiritual studies, and exposes the weaknesses of human beings in the face of the unknown. There’s a lot in there.
We did want to slap the protagonist a few times, but on the other hand, the background to what was happening became more and more intriguing. Authors themselves play a large part in the book, and there are some neat parts on the links between horror stories, madness and reality which somehow reminded us of Ramsey Campbell.
Sadly we can’t say much more about the developments, as that would spoil the book. Reviewers often say that, but in this case it’s true. You have to be there. Most things are not quite what they seem, although the nastier parts are – nasty, that is. On a single read through, we found the central section the most interesting and disturbing, and yet the final part is a more direct and immediate twist. As we mentioned the Blood Friends earlier, most memorable image this time: M L Hazzard’s alter-ego. Even though we can’t disclose what we mean.
It made us wonder if the real-life author has, hidden on some remote, decrepit farmhouse, a complete and over-arching vision of his astral, abnormal concepts, written out on yellowing pages. We sort of hope that he has, and that one day a naive young research student will stumble over it and begin a story around a story that will probably drive everyone involved insane.
And in a creaking attic, Adam Nevill will lift mouldering robes around his thin shoulders and begin once more. Except that it would probably be a mouldering leather jacket in his case…
You can check out some of his books on Amazon through the links below:
We’ll finish by mentioning, with slight embarassment, that greydogtales was the runner up in the recent Preditor & Editor Readers Awards for review site of the year. If deserved, this must be mainly on the basis that we rattle on longer than most sites, and don’t know when to…