The Ritual

Acknowledgements

Tired, bedraggled and wretched is the writer who walks alone. So many thanks to Hugh ‘Hershey’ Simmons for not only reading this book so thoroughly (and more than once at that), but for the expeditions he has led; especially the one that gave birth to this idea, that saw us forced to make camp in the snow, shortly after finding two dead sheep hanging from trees. I’ve carried the recollection for nineteen years until it found a home in this story.

The deepest affection to Anne for her love, support, patience and advice, and to my dad for his careful readings again.

National Parks in Sweden: Europe’s Last Wilderness by Claes Grundsten; The Dolmens and Early Passage Graves of Sweden by Christopher Tilley; Early Norrland 10: Lapps and Scandinavians: Archeological Finds from Northern Sweden by Ingrar Zachrissan; The Land of the Midnight Sun by Paul Belloni Du Chailu, were all essential to my research. And I owe much to that insightful and fascinating book, Lords of Chaos: The Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground by Didrik Soderland and Michael Moynihan, without which Blood Frenzy would never have formed. I have taken a liberty with the concept of ‘a fist in the face of God’ created in the lyrics of Darkthrone’s ‘To Walk the Infernal Fields’, and amended the idea into a notion of ‘spitting in the face of God’ on page 349, to affect Blood Frenzy’s emulation of early Black Metal revolutionary ideas. The chilling true stories of John Krakauer, Simon Yates, Joe Simpson and Nick Heil, and the fiction of Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, Scott Smith, Cormac McCarthy and James Dickey all made me want to write about life and death in the wilderness.

Very special thanks to my agent John Jarrold and my editor Julie Crisp for their support and advice. Much gratitude also goes out to Chloe Healy, Amy Lines and Liz Johnson, and the team at Pan Macmillan for giving me a chance, and then spreading the word.

Cheers to Steve Saville and his wife for checking my Swedish incantation. And I want to raise my claws in tribute to the bloggers, reviewers and readers of Apartment 16, who really opened the door for that book and for its author. A final long salute to Horror Reanimated, Mathew Riley, Joseph Delacey, Peter Tennant, Andrew Cox, and Black Static for their continued interest and support.