Like so many other Millennials, Stephanie has found steady employment difficult to come by since the Great Recession. After leaving her unstable stepmother's house and fleeing north to Birmingham, England, Stephanie is scraping by on temp jobs and living in a room she calls "the cell." Her fortunes seem to change when she finds an all-female boarding house offering relatively spacious rooms for low rent. She uses her entire meager savings on a deposit.
Unfortunately for Stephanie, her first night in 82 Edgehill Road includes an unwelcome encounter with the supernatural. By morning, she realizes moving into this dilapidated house was a grave mistake, one she hopes to rectify by getting her deposit back from the landlord. But slimy Knacker McGuire has other plans. He effectively holds Stephanie hostage by refusing her refund request. With no friends or family to turn to, and no money left in her bank account, Stephanie is forced to contend with increasingly terrifying supernatural phenomena. When Knacker's foul cousin, Fergal, shows up, Stephanie's situation becomes a matter of life or death.
Adam Nevill (Last Days; The Ritual) crafts a creepy if sometimes flawed story in No One Gets Out Alive. Stephanie's poor decision-making process, if a necessary genre staple, is absurd at times. The novel is overlong and makes a jarring temporal leap two-thirds of the way through. Despite these shortcomings, No One Gets Out Alive makes masterful work of an oppressively suspenseful atmosphere and antagonists readers will love to hate. Nevill excels at building dread and providing genuinely terrifying payoffs. --Tobias Mutter, freelance reviewer