Customer Reviews

A Map of the Dark

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This short novel is an uncompromising study of social dynamics in interlocking groups of children, teenagers, and adults in a small town on an extremely eventful night. A foolish murder plot, its concealment, a moving attempt to foil it, and its execution and aftermath provide the suspenseful through-line.

The different age groups are delightfully characterized but the point of the novel lies in the universality of the drives they have in common.

The style is mostly a highly effective just-the-facts objectivity. This objectivity extends even to the use of a "real time" technique, where every moment in a block of time seems to be accounted for; this can be effective but can also try the reader's memory and patience.

Though the author's intellectual agenda sometimes gets in the way of his story (leading to some symbolic actions that jar against the overall hyper-realism), his relentless concentration on the pain of exclusion and the torments of loneliness gives this book a primal power that makes a lot of literature seem tepid.