![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Recommended in Paperbacks from Hell
, this is actually a collection of two novellas. I haven't yet read the second one, "Beauty Is..."
"When Darkness Loves Us" is a well-written, atmospheric, and extremely creepy work of psychological horror. Or maybe magical realism. Or dark fantasy. It's hard to put a label on it.
Sally Ann is sixteen and pregnant, just married, in love, relishing sex, and looking forward to life with her husband, living near her family and his. Until she ventures down a flight of stairs set into the earth, stairs which lead to a labyrinth of tunnels where it's said that once escaped slaves fled and died there when they couldn't find their way out. But she forgot that her husband was going to weld the door shut so their child could never get lost there. The door is closed forever, leaving Sally Ann trapped in the darkness.
But she doesn't die. Living in total darkness, she survives on moss and slugs and icy water, giving birth and raising her son alone. Until she finally finds a way to emerge into the light, and finds out what happened to her husband and family while she was gone...
This story is incredibly unsettling, using extremely vivid, realistic-seeming details to anchor a storyline that's much more like magical realism than ordinary horror; this makes it impossible to tell exactly what's really happening and what's in Sally Ann's mind, what's psychological horror and what's sociological horror. The legacy of slavery, the symbolism of sex and birth, light and darkness both real and metaphoric, the ghosts of dead people and the ghosts of the past: it all melds together in a story that invites to try to separate those threads from each other while making them impossible to pull apart.
If you've already read the story...( Read more... )
When Darkness Loves Us (Paperbacks from Hell)
, this is actually a collection of two novellas. I haven't yet read the second one, "Beauty Is...""When Darkness Loves Us" is a well-written, atmospheric, and extremely creepy work of psychological horror. Or maybe magical realism. Or dark fantasy. It's hard to put a label on it.
Sally Ann is sixteen and pregnant, just married, in love, relishing sex, and looking forward to life with her husband, living near her family and his. Until she ventures down a flight of stairs set into the earth, stairs which lead to a labyrinth of tunnels where it's said that once escaped slaves fled and died there when they couldn't find their way out. But she forgot that her husband was going to weld the door shut so their child could never get lost there. The door is closed forever, leaving Sally Ann trapped in the darkness.
But she doesn't die. Living in total darkness, she survives on moss and slugs and icy water, giving birth and raising her son alone. Until she finally finds a way to emerge into the light, and finds out what happened to her husband and family while she was gone...
This story is incredibly unsettling, using extremely vivid, realistic-seeming details to anchor a storyline that's much more like magical realism than ordinary horror; this makes it impossible to tell exactly what's really happening and what's in Sally Ann's mind, what's psychological horror and what's sociological horror. The legacy of slavery, the symbolism of sex and birth, light and darkness both real and metaphoric, the ghosts of dead people and the ghosts of the past: it all melds together in a story that invites to try to separate those threads from each other while making them impossible to pull apart.
If you've already read the story...( Read more... )
When Darkness Loves Us (Paperbacks from Hell)
