The Ritual

The Ritual is a horror novel by the British writer Adam Nevill, published in 2011. It was his third novel and was followed by Last Days in 2012, and it won the British Fantasy Award for best horror novel. A film adaptation directed by David Bruckner appeared in 2017.

The story follows four friends from their university days, Dom, Phil, Luke and Hutch, who reunite for a hiking trip in the mountains of northern Sweden. The trip was chosen because it was cheap, since Luke could not afford anything more ambitious, and the four of them have very little left to say to each other.

When Phil develops blisters and Dom injures his knee, the group leaves the marked trail and cuts through forest to save time. The woodland has been left alone for a very long time, and the shortcut carries them further from help than any of them realises.

They take shelter in a building they come across, and work out that the rites once performed inside it were meant to feed something that has not gone away. The novel is built as a survival story that tightens into something older, with the group's own resentments doing at least as much harm as whatever is waiting for them.