Apartment 16

Barrington House is an upmarket apartment block in London, and one of its flats, Apartment 16, has stood sealed for fifty years. Seth, the night porter, hears a disturbance behind its door after midnight. He begins to look into it.

Apryl, a young American, travels to London to sort out the flat that her great-aunt Lillian left to her. Lillian is rumoured to have been mad. Her diaries point to something terrible that she was caught up in decades earlier.

The narrative alternates between Apryl and Seth, and each chapter brings more of the building's buried history into view. Their two lines of inquiry run toward the same locked flat.

Published in 2010, this horror novel made the 2011 shortlist for the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel. Adam Nevill spent four years, from 2000 to 2004, working as a porter and night watchman in apartment buildings across west London, and the setting draws on that time. What waits inside the flat is the question the book turns on.