James Nicoll Reviews

Wen-Yi Lee’s 2023 The Dark We Know is a stand-alone horror novel.

Isadora ​“Isa” Chang grew up in the isolated mining town of Slater. The community was repressive, her father was abusive, and two of her three close friends died. Isa fled, enrolling at a distant art school. She left the town, her sister and mother, and her best friend Mason Kane behind.

Art students are often short on money. Thus, when Isa’s father dies, the promise of a small inheritance is enough to tempt Isa back to Slater.

Immediately before Isa turned her back on Slater, her close friend Wren Carver vanished. Wren’s body turned up in a local pond. Soon after, Zach Tai shot himself.

The common element in both deaths was Mason, who was Wren’s secret boyfriend and who was the last person to speak to Zach before Zach killed himself. Despite the lack of concrete evidence, the townspeople have blamed Mason for the deaths.

On her return, Isa discovers that Paige Vandersteen has vanished. Again, suspicion falls on Mason. As with the earlier incidents, the logic is less based on evidence and more on a view of Mason as the go-to scapegoat. Isa does not believe Mason is guilty. However, the pattern of deaths suggests that someone or at least something might be guilty.

Isa fled when she was sixteen. Now that Isa is a mature eighteen-year-old, she is ready to confront the town secrets. She will be helped by her own talents (she paints what amount to visions), but also by Mason’s mother, who is a medium.

They have the applicable skills to deal with… the Angel.

The Angel is more of a what than a who, but it does have goals and sincere motivations. The Angel sincerely believes it is acting for the greater good each time it leads a teen towards suicide. The Angel has no intention of stopping.

Slater’s adults will never end the Angel’s quiet reign of terror. Therefore, it falls to Isa and Mason to unravel the mysteries of what the Angel is, why it is, what it wants, and how to stop it.

~oOo~

Horror novels are by their nature almost always stand-alone. Still, I wonder what Isa will think of her world-weary eighteen-year-old-self when she’s forty.

Even if the Angel weren’t picking off teens one by one, Slater is doomed¹. The adults are useless or worse, the economy is stagnant, the culture is stultifying for all but the most conventional teen². The net effect is that Slater sputters off teens faster than it produces them³. At some point, Slater will be a community of old people, then an abandoned graveyard. This would be a bit sad if there were anything about Slater to miss, which there does not seem to be.

Decay is only accelerated by the Angel.

There are some legitimately terrible people in Slater, but the conflict that drives the plot is not good against evil, but good against good. Both Isa’s crew and the Angel are pursuing what they see as the greatest good. It’s just that the two sides have come to very different conclusions about what that is⁴.

I am not the target market for this book, but the people for whom the novel is intended will no doubt enjoy the author’s prose, and the skill with which they exploit the claustrophobic potential of small towns, towns bedeviled by unpleasant realities everyone is desperately ignoring.

The Dark We Know is available here (Zando), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Bookshop US), here (Bookshop UK), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

1: Of course, every place is doomed, if you’re patient enough. USA delenda est.

2: Of particular relevance to Isa and her three friends, Slater isn’t friendly to teenagers who like kissing boys and girls. Although it does seem to produce a lot of teens who do.

3: So, why are there still young people at all? Not everyone gets accepted to college and not everyone can afford to move. Some people don’t want to leave their friends and relatives behind.

4: Dark would have been a much shorter novel if certain major characters had been in therapy (and if there had been any affordable therapists within a hundred miles). I often think that when reading horror.