Book Review: "The Suffering" by David Sodergren

I recently watched the movie Late Night with the Devil and I have to say that as a horror movie it really isn't all that, but as a movie on its own it is actually pretty good. It reminded me of movies like I Saw the TV Glow and books like Kiersten White's Mister Magic (which I absolutely loved). But I needed the scare factor and so, I had a choice - do I roll the dice on another horror movie/book I have not seen/read or do I return to a trusted author who can scare the pants off me? Well, I went for the latter. David Sodergren is a fantastic author and honestly, there really has not been anything I've read by him that I can say is less than a 4/5. Books like The Haar and Maggie's Grave definitely have an originality when it comes to horror and so, I have high hopes of this one too!

Oh and I was not disappointed...

When a girl is found barely alive in the woods, a doctor tries to take care of her and take her to the care of some nuns in an abbey in order to make sure she gets better with trusted people around her. Unfortunately enough for this book though, it quickly turns from just a story about nuns nursing a girl back to health to something more reminiscent of The Nun from The Conjuring Universe. David Sodergren makes light work of the atmosphere as we already have something here clearly set up. A dark abbey where we can imagine things are lit by candlelight. Women wandering about it hoods and the echoes of footsteps throughout the quiet of the isolated daytime.

When we move through the story we of course get those images of great gore that we constantly await when it comes to this author, except these are probably just as gory as The Haar when it comes down to it. As a weird evil is unleashed from the arrival of this girl, there seems to be something secret and deadly that doesn't want to leave the abbey until all of the nuns have been punished with violent and terrifying deaths. And oh no, please don't think that the vast majority of these deaths are violent and quick, nope - some of them are horrifying and slow and involve a lurking plague which literally blackens the body in a charcoal-like manner. The body horror of this book stretches though, far beyond simply looking towards plague.

David Sodergren weaves cannibalism into the mix. One scene when one of the sisters has clearly died, the nuns sit down to eat soup but one of them chokes having accidentally swallowed something she shouldn't have. Once all the nuns look down they see the body parts of their former sister floating around in their soup and begin violently vomitting. The head of the former sister is then rolled into the room as panic ensues. Honestly I didn't think that jump scares were possible in books until I started reading David Sodergren's novels, so I can highly recommend things like this to you.

His writing never feels crude though. It just feels like this is the direction the story is going in and we, as readers, must accept it. This is the thing I like about Sodergren's work, it doesn't feel like a fetish. It feels like there is a story beneath the story, something we are purposefully being shielded from seeing, there's almost like an extended metaphor beneath everything. It is very literary apt and contains a great amount of detail and atmosphere apart from the gore. The stories themselves are always quite imaginative and wonderful.

All in all, this is another great horror novel by David Sodergren and though the atmosphere is great, it still isn't for the faint of heart when it comes to the gore. I loved this one because of how it lays out a very common religious fear and yet, there's still a bit of a twist within the text which will make you question what is really going on here. I was quite surprised at the twist though you really have to pay attention to the book to see what meaning lurks beneath the surface. This is pure nightmare fuel.