Darkness on the Edge of Town

Brian Keene

Leisure Books

Dorchester Publishing (2010)

The little town of Walden wakes up one morning to find that morning hasn’t come. It is still dark outside – not the darkness of heavy cloud cover, but a deep, intense darkness that excludes all sound, light and power. Nothing gets past the barrier of darkness that surrounds the town. No rain, no power, no radio, particularly no people.

As the locals set off to work in outside towns they drive into the darkness and disappear forever. From the few who try walking into the darkness, there are a few screams, then nothing. For those still in town it is worse. The darkness is alive. It talks to you in your mind, it shows you illusions of people you loved who died some time ago. It calls you to walk into the darkness and join them.

“Sure, I didn’t see them die ….but I heard them. Heard them die. I heard their screams. And the other sounds. The sounds the Darkness makes”

Robbie Higgins is not the brightest man in town but he is one of the first to experience the hallucinations and the effect of the Darkness on the human mind. It is malevolent, turning the trapped people against each other. Robbie and a small group of people who live in the same apartment block band together for defence as the town degenerates into lawlessness. The looting starts on the first “day” but people get desperate as they run out of water, food and fuel. Soon the streets are in a stae of anarchy and the death toll from murder, rape and pillage is rising. Many deaths seem completely irrational as the Darkness works on the weaker minds. The only way to survive is to carry a gun and be prepared to use it.

Robbie and his friends try an experiment to see if they can get through the Darkness. It doesn’t work and more people are killed. They are trapped in their own apartment building by the crowd whipped up by the dead people’s friends and a woman crazed by religion and a belief in witches.

Robbie knows they must get out of the town and escape the Darkness, but he is not even sure if there is anything outside to escape to. Nevertheless he has another plan and the survivors know they must attempt it or die in the town.

The story draws on earlier books like The Mist, but Brian Keene skilfully paints a darker picture of desperation and hopelessness. The story seems slow-moving at first but he uses the slow pace to build up the prison-like feeling of being trapped in a place that has lost any humanity. Darkness follows on from his earlier books but I don’t want to give the plot away. The book stands by itself quite well.

In the genre of post-apocalypse novels, this is one of the better ones.

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This review will appear in Volume 3 No.2 of the digital and print edition of Synergy Magazine.

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