The story and characters of "Darkest Night" first came to my attention as one of the darker screenplays I've ever read, and the novel on which that screenplay was based is even darker.
The Mudd family struggles under the boot of Abram Mudd, a patriarchal paranoiac whose delusions of cosmic importance, coupled with a self-serving religion of his own making (a toxic pastiche of an anti-Semitic gentile fanboy's fascination with the Tanakh, a selective New Testament browser's wide-eyed yearning for apocalypse, an emotional adolescent's magical thinking and the universal male illusion that it is his phallus, and not the sun, around which all known life revolves) create an insular familial world in which "the other" (that is to say, almost everyone else) is shunned and feared.
Son Zachary Mudd's growing unease with the family's dystopian dynamic leads to a struggle which, given both the world of the novel and the world-view of the Mudds, seems doomed to despair. And yet we hope...Zachary is the one light shining here, and the reader cannot help but to to cheer him on in his stagger towards liberty, halting and unsure as it is.
Michael Sean Erickson's prosiac prose spares no disturbing metaphor and gets so deep into the damaged mental state of many of the characters in "Darkest Night" that one has to take a break from reading every now and then, just to remind one's self that love is stronger than fear, and that people like Abram Mudd, while they do exist, are the past for our species and not the future. Or so, at least, we hope.
It's a good read for silent winter months, for seasons of barren trees when the urge to surrender to a cold darkness breathes in the icy wind.
(Note: the screenplay for "Darkest Night' is slated for production in 2017.)
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