Author: Erin Eveland
Publisher: Selladore Press
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.
Erratum:
p99 "...normal human's did..." should be "...normal humans did..."
I made it only half-way through this novel before I had to give up. Darkness is very aptly named, and I don't mean that as a compliment. It's relentlessly miserable, and dark with horrifying things happening to the 16-year-old female protagonist, and that would be fine if the story was going anywhere, or if there was some sort of light visible, however dimly, at the end of the tunnel, but there never is - not in the part I read.
This is a dark and unnerving young-adult novel, part of a series, with a prologue that I skipped as always. My position is that if it's worth reading, it's worth putting into chapter one or later, but the employment of a prologue was particularly curious in this instance, because we then went on to have an additional three-chapter prologue! It really made me wonder what the purpose of the defined prologue actually was. The story really begins in chapter four, a decade on from the first three chapters, where we discover that Catherine is pretty much taking care of herself since her grandmother's death.
unfortunately, very little of real substance happens. We learn that Catherine has an unusual relationship with darkness. She can manipulate her own shadow - without moving her body to do it - forcing it to assume disturbing forms, and one day she sees ravenous 'shadows' on her grandmother Margaret, small ones, she says, but she knows that larger ones are coming. She says she can banish them; then Margaret awakens after a spell of unconsciousness feeling even more nervous about her granddaughter than she already did.
Catherine describes a man to Margaret - an almost formless man - who wears a hat, and who speaks to her. He claims he's Catherine's guardian, and asserts that he will become her lover and her teacher. Margaret's feeble response is to take Catherine to church - like that's ever going to help.
Catherine is the offspring of Margaret's daughter Kathy, an unruly and wild child who disappeared, only to reappear later demanding money for an abortion, which Margaret refused to grant. She did volunteer her home for Kathy to have a place and support to raise her child, hoping it would settle her down, but it failed. Kathy completely disappeared after her daughter's birth. In having this 'substitute daughter' with a similar name to her own daughter's, Margaret found that she could comfortably live with this life, but now she's old and ailing, and Catherine seems to be having a host of issues of her own. Yet despite her seeming to care for the young girl, the grandmother has taken precious few precautions to protect her from her lowlife mom.
When Margaret is taken seriously ill with a heart ailment, things begin looking darker for Catherine than ever they have. She discovers that whatever power she has can be used not only to protect her grandmother from the shadows, but also to protect herself from other people. But they cannot prevent her grandmother's death. That's when we jump to ten years later to discover that Catherine has been forced to endure her tyrant bitch mom, who crawled out from under her rock when her own mother died to pick up a meager inheritance. How she even knew about it is unexplained, and how the moronic child-care system ended up placing Catherine with her absentee lowlife mother is also unexplained, but such things do happen in real life, I'm sorry to say.
The one hope in Catherine's life (and again, I'm sorry to say because it's such a trope) is her friend Nathan, who rescued her from bullies some years before, and who now works as a dishwasher in a bar having 'graduated' high school. In a way, it's easy to see how Catherine would grasp at him as a lifeline, but even that is a stretch. He lives close by her in the same trailer park although she sees little of him now that he works evenings and she's still in school, but there is zero magic between them, not even a spark.
The problem is that neither of these two shows any real affinity for the other, even though both of them so we're told, claim to be strongly attracted to the other, so the romance was a complete non-starter for me. Nathan is also attached to the darkness via a stranger who shows up in the bar where he works, so this makes two dark strangers, neither of which seem to have anything going on. Even after reading half the novel I had no idea who they were, what they represented, what they were after, or why they took such an interest in Catherine or in Nathan. Again, Darkness is a very apt title because I felt completely in the dark.
I don't mind a plot that unfolds over the pages and chapters, but this story moved (if indeed it did move) so ponderously slowly that I couldn't detect any real movement at all. It seemed to me to be nothing more than one depressingly dark event after another with no purpose or direction and no leavening in between - or even hope of any. I started getting the feeling that the author hated Catherine and had no other purpose in mind than to punish her relentlessly. That's not a good feeling for an author to imbue in her readers. If she has no love for her character, then why on Earth should I?
I grew sincere doubts that anything would happen before the last chapter and then it would likely be no more than a cliff-hanger for volume two in this series. I ran out of interest in pursuing this story, let alone moving on to a second volume. I cannot recommend it.
