Customer Reviews

From Darkness

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Karil Wade offers readers fresh proof that the art of horror fiction remains alive and well in the world today. From Darkness is quite an entertaining, suspenseful read, featuring an effectively gloomy air of creepiness, some truly stimulating moments of gruesomeness, and more nuance than you might expect from such a book at first glance. The novel starts out as your basic haunted house story. You have newlyweds moving into a house with a questionable past, a palpable sense of something not good coming from the basement, a general sense of wrongness that the bride's sister picks up on immediately, and even an ill-fated house blessing by a local priest. After a certain point, however, the story evolves into something more complex and almost Lovecraftian in its otherworldliness. You have a tight-lipped island community protecting the secret of the evil presence their ancestors foolishly evoked decades ago, not a mere hole in a basement wall but a series of portals linking transient, underground tunnels beneath the landscape, and an unseen monster calling himself the Devourer of Souls. This otherworldly presence, whatever it is, has a tendency to go around ripping people's heads off for some unknown purpose - and, if you ask me, you just can't go wrong with multiple decapitations.

Wade sets a solid foundation for the story, as newlyweds Mike and Tina fall in love with the old house on Orca Island. Then Connie, the bride's sister, takes a look, senses something frightening in the old family graveyard out back, and knows in her gut that the family had been murdered in that very house. Then the caretaker tells a wonderfully gruesome story about the original family having been decapitated in the basement. The couple moves in anyway, having been convinced that the legend was just a joke, only to begin experiencing weird things in the basement almost immediately. Later on, there's a particularly memorable scene that takes place in the graveyard, and the impossible but all too real event that takes place there pretty much removes any doubt that the evil is real. It's also hard to run away from, as the horror now begins to spread beyond Orca Island (leaving a trail of decapitated heads in its wake). It is here that the novel seems to me to lose a little bit of its focus, as the authorities (both police and military) become involved in a really big way. The ultimate resolution comes down to an individual confrontation, but much of the intimate creepiness that defines the early chapters of the book has diminished somewhat by this point.

From Darkness was a very enjoyable and suspenseful read, but I'm not sure I completely understood the true nature of the head-snatching evil "monster." There is a lot of new information to suddenly process in the novel's final pages, and it left me a tad confused in the end. Certainly, though, I would recommend this novel to horror fans. The characters are well-drawn, the horrors are gruesome enough to delight hard-core horror fans (like me) without being too gruesome for those of a weaker constitution, the action proceeds at a consistently steady pace, and the nuances built into the story make this much more than just another haunted house novel.

I make enough typos when I write that I'm normally hesitant to criticize a book for the same problem. From Darkness, unfortunately, suffers from what I call apostrophe abuse, i.e., contractions that are de-contracted - like using "your" for "you're." I find this distracting, since I have to stop and reread a sentence to get its meaning. From Darkness suffers from such a bad case of this I've subtracted a star for bad editing. Which is a shame in what is otherwise a readable story.

The story starts out as a 'newly-wed couple move into a house with a dark past' novel. The dark past in this case is a large number of beheadings in the basement, and an eerie tunnel that keeps appearing and disappearing. Something happened a long time ago and Tina and Mike Moore are right in the middle of the aftermath. What lay hidden in the basement has no intention of staying there any longer than it has to. And when it rises there will be all hell to pay.

The young couple, Tina's sister Connie, and a host of supporting characters become involved in extracting the truth from the tiny community that makes its home on Orca Island. With each step of the way the problem worsens until a case of the domestic terrors develops into a national emergency.

This combination of bad-thing-in-the-basement and end-of-the-world works surprisingly well, although I wish that more time had been spent in building up the transitions. The story starts at an intimate level and then suddenly escalates to military confrontations and back again. This is a quick, very action oriented read that would have benefited from about 50 more pages of details and character development.

If you like a lot of action, some gruesome bits, and a dash or two of romance, this might be exactly what you want for late night reading. Karil Wade demonstrated that she is a capable story-teller, and I would keep an eye out for future developments.