Leisure / February 2010
Reviewed by: Rick R. Reed
Synopsis: One morning the residents of Walden, Virginia, woke to find themselves cut off from the rest of the world by an impenetrable wall of darkness.
Review: The premise above sounds intriguing, doesn’t it? Especially for fans of books like Stephen King’s Under the Dome or even Michael Grant’s Gone. Like Darkness on the Edge of Town, those books both had apocalyptic breakdown of civilization premises and both of them worked, more or less. I wish I could say the same for Keene’s work.
The simple synopsis above, taken from the book’s Amazon detail page, is chilling – and it pretty much encapsulates the whole novel – and that’s too bad, because the premise offers so much more potential. The dark is one of our greatest human fears, with us from as far back as most of us can remember. To imagine a world where a thick wall of darkness has surrounded it, cutting off rain, wind, electricity, and other humanity beyond the confines of our one small town is some genuinely creepy fodder for spine-tingling horror. What lurks in the darkness? What if the darkness were a real thing? A force, evil and unconquerable?
To his credit, Keene does explore those last couple of questions in his story of a small town where suddenly darkness reigns and it appears that its twelve thousand or so residents are the only people remaining in existence. But it almost seems as though he set out to downplay what could have been a genuinely horrifying thrill-ride and mute it, burying it in shades closer to gray than black.
Like Stephen King, to whom this author is often compared, Keene gives us a ragtag assortment of working class characters, everymen and everywomen, and sets them down in circumstances that are bizarre and terrifying. Here we have the good-hearted average Joe pizza deliveryman, living with his pot-smoking girlfriend in a rundown apartment. The deliveryman narrates the story, or what there is of a story. The characters, like the story, are bleak and hopeless.
Unfortunately, Keene doesn’t give us much of a story; he gives us a situation. Darkness falls. Darkness is a real thing, a hungry beast capable of preying on our worst fears and longings. Darkness may have destroyed the rest of the world save for the inhabitants of this small Virginia town. Darkness is driving the townsfolk crazy, pitting them against each other and causing them to revert to raping, killing, and mutilating beasts.
But that’s really it. We watch as things go from bad to worse. We listen in on endless conversation about how hopeless the characters’ plights are. We see them feebly try to beat back the pitch. But there’s no real tension. There’s no suspense. The book plods along and never really finds a good foothold, not in sympathetic characters or in a careful building of conflict and tension. I kept reading, partially because I knew I was reviewing the book for this column and partly because I have read other Brian Keene books and loved them. I hoped that this one would redeem itself. I longed for a crackerjack of an ending, a devious twist, maybe an explanation of why.
And I got no payoff. The book, like some of the town’s residents, limped along to an anticlimactic ending that left me feeling dissatisfied and disappointed.
I usually try and write about books that cast a spell in a good way for this column. Unfortunately, Darkness on the Edge of Town cast only a spell of impatience to move on to the next book.
Purchase Darkness on the Edge of Town by Brian Keene.
Columnist Rick R. Reed is the author of thirteen novels, three collections, and has short fiction in more than twenty anthologies. He lives in Seattle, WA. Find out more about the author at his official author website.