While some of the novels on the Books of Horror Go To List are obscure outside of extreme circles, others have cracked the mainstream powerfully enough that they've found life outside the horror community. 'The Watchers' is one of the latter because it started out as an indie Irish horror novel but became the feature film debut of M. Night Shyamalan's daughter, Ishana Night Shyamalan. I'll be watching it on Max as soon as I finish writing this review, to see if her visualisation of this comes close to mine.

It's a book that feels organic but was surely very carefully constructed indeed and not remotely in the order in which it's presented, which is ruthlessly chronological. We're in Ireland, because A. M. Shine is an Irish author, and specifically in the west coast town of Galway, where Mina survives as a mostly starving artist, doing enough to get by but not well enough to get ahead or to impress her sister. She's broke enough that when Peter, a local drunk she knows, offers her two hundred euros to deliver a bird, a golden conure, to a buyer somewhere in Connemara, she takes it. She certainly can't say no to the money.

Unfortunately, his map isn't good, her car breaks down and she walks into a wood, and now she's a part of something else. What she's a part of we don't yet know, but it's obvious that the author is rubbing his grubby hands together in glee watching us figure it out. OK, he probably doesn't have grubby hands and he's surely not literally watching us safely turn pages in bed but it does feel like a distinct possibility. He doesn't throw a lot at us at all, the setup being relatively simple, but it's very deliberate and very specific and it all feels rather like a challenge on a bunch of levels.

Let me explain. Inside the wood, there is a house. Most of it is dilapidated, open to the elements. What isn't is a room that we'll soon come to know as the Coop. It's completely solid and there are many locks on the door. One of the Coop's walls is a window that's transparent during the day, so anyone inside can watch anything outside, but becomes a mirror at night, when the light turns on automatically, and it's the turn of what's outside to watch who's inside. And there are absolutely  watchers out there because they're audible and they sound dangerous, enough so that the main characters are very keen to be inside the Coop, behind that locked door, when the light comes on.

If you're counting, that suggests three definitions for the title with another one implicit. People inside the Coop watch whatever's outside through the window, but that almost doesn't count, as the forest simply isn't that interesting during the day and they can walk outside safely, gathering food and water to keep them alive, knowing that it's too big for them to escape in daylight. Those creatures outside at night watch them inside. And as we imagine Shine watching us to see if we're figuring this out, there's also an implicit nod that someone else is watching all the above because surely to goodness nothing here is accidental.

Of course, the most obvious watchers are the creatures who roam the forest at night looking into the Coop through the window. We don't know anything about them because we spend our nights inside with the few characters unlucky enough to have ended up there and that window's a mirror at night. During the day, when we follow those characters outside, the nightly creatures are gone, probably into underground tunnels in which they presumably live. And, of course, nobody's going down those just to ask questions. These creatures, whatever they might look like, sound horrific.

I mentioned characters, plural, because Mina is merely the latest arrival. Madeline is the nominal leader, partly because she's older and she takes charge naturally, but partly because she's been in the Coop the longest, well over two years now. This is routine for her. She holds no illusions about escape. It's just survival now. Danny is the youngest, a biker running away from an abusive father, and he's willing and able enough to set traps and fetch water, even though he doesn't have lots of initiative. In between is Ciara, who's mourning the loss of her husband John, who we saw taken in the prologue as he tried in vain to reach the edge of the forest before it got dark. She's lost inside her head now, meaning that Mina is the only one actively trying to figure out an escape.

And that's about it, at least until a certain point which I'm not going to talk about because that's emphatically spoiler territory. The joy is trying to figure out everything and I'm not going to get in the way of that for you, except to ask the same questions you will. Why is the forest not on maps? Why do cars and bikes break down when they come too close? Why is the Coop there? Who built it with its window wall and why? What are the nocturnal creatures that roam the forest? And, most of all, are they the only watchers of the title or is someone else watching everything?

This is a uniquely Irish folk horror novel but the immediate comparison I had, once Mina reached the Coop and learned the basic rules, was to the feature 'Cube', which is science fiction even more than it is horror. There are obvious differences, of course. While the Coop feels exactly like a cube in 'Cube', it's the only one; it isn't connected to a bunch of others. The people stuck within it don't appear to have been chosen; they found their way there by accident and at different times rather than waking up there at the same time by design. And, of course, the Coop isn't contained except when they lock the door; they can leave during the day and there are creatures outside at night. However, the questions are mostly the same. Why is it there? What's it for? Who built it? In a way, the creatures outside are the trap.

The first success Shine has here is the setup. The second is the way that everything falls into a sort of routine without the book getting boring. The pages roll along effortlessly just like weeks in the Coop for our four characters, but Shine never loses us, even though living under these restrictions must be a serious mental strain for them all. It'll be a challenge for the film to duplicate this feat but Shine does shockingly well with it. The third comes with discoveries and twists, at which point I clam up because you should make these discoveries along with the characters and feel the twists along with us.

What I will say is that I saw the first twist coming, at least kinda sorta because I had no idea of the form that it would take. I saw the second twist coming too, again kinda sorta because I did figure out a particular key detail but failed to make the further logical extrapolation. I didn't see any of the layers, perhaps because, while I was asking good questions from the very outset, I realised as they started to manifest that I hadn't asked all of them. Setting all this up is tasty writing. Having it unfold without us figuring everything out makes it all the more successful.

My copy of 'The Watchers' includes a sample from his next novel, 'The Creeper', which is unrelated. However, he's returned to Mina and the mythology he created here with a sequel that came out a couple of weeks ago. It's called 'Stay in the Light' and I'll keep my eyes open for it. If Shine was this good with his debut, his plotting clever and his language smooth and effortlessly poetic, how good is he going to become as he grows into his stature as a novelist? I'd like to watch that growth as it happens.

And, with that all written, so to the movie. It turns out to be a pretty close adaptation but it's not as good, mostly because it telegraphs all the twists so that nothing comes as much of a shock, even if it's supposed to. I can understand why Ishana Night Shyamalan added details to make the scenes of routine less boring visually but she lost the character depth as she did so; Daniel and Ciara have little substance in the film. She did add some clever visuals to play into the themes, the mirror wall serving as an excellent visual metaphor, but it isn't enough to do the book justice. As is usually the case, the book is much better than the film. ~~ Hal C F Astell