Put on your blindfold. Don’t read this until you read this book. I want to talk about this book, but it’s imperative that if you want to read something really, truly scary, you want to make sure you know as little as possible before checking out this book. So blind yourself from this – cover the windows, bar the doors, remove the light from your eyes only until you check out this book, either on audio or reading it like I did (I can’t even imagine this book on audio…).

Read it yet?

Okay.

I devoured 80% of this book in less than a day – that’s how voracious the book is with your time. In the spirit of the books content, I’m not entirely sure whether I was devouring the book, or if the book was devouring me, forcing me to keep turning page after stressful, sometimes terrifying, page almost against my will. But I ate it up, and loved every bitter bite.

The Pitch Dark

For those who haven’t heard anything about this book yet and DON’T want to ruin their sleep for a night, the premise is as follows:

Something is out there . . . Something terrifying that must not be seen. One glimpse and a person is driven to deadly violence. No one knows what it is or where it came from. Five years after it began, a handful of scattered survivors remain, including Malorie and her two young children. Living in an abandoned house near the river, she has dreamed of fleeing to a place where they might be safe. Now, that the boy and girl are four, it is time to go. But the journey ahead will be terrifying: twenty miles downriver in a rowboat—blindfolded—with nothing to rely on but her wits and the children’s trained ears. One wrong choice and they will die. And something is following them. But is it man, animal, or monster? Engulfed in darkness, surrounded by sounds both familiar and frightening, Malorie embarks on a harrowing odyssey—a trip that takes her into an unseen world and back into the past, to the companions who once saved her. Under the guidance of the stalwart Tom, a motely group of strangers banded together against the unseen terror, creating order from the chaos. But when supplies ran low, they were forced to venture outside—and confront the ultimate question: in a world gone mad, who can really be trusted?

I’ve had this book on hold at my library for months, anxiously awaiting its arrival, and it did not let me down from this great premise, like so many books before. The world that’s been built here is pretty spartan, without a ton of worldbuilding on Malerman’s part, but I think that suits the narrative. The story is presented in third person, present tense, so our “sight” (it’s too easy), is restricted to just Malorie’s experiences, either of her past or present, and only some of her thoughts. With a book this short, we can see Malerman really take his time to craft an experience, and making the POV so present and limited adds to this idea of “blindness” in its various forms. I’m always a little dubious of present tense – sometimes it feels like your running right up against the thoughts of the character, especially if the voice isn’t strong. But it sets a manic pace for the book, since things are happening directly in the moment, we panic when Malorie panics, and it creates a shared experience that’s so strong I had to put the book down and walk away from it several times.

Not very far though… I had to find out what happens.

Some mention should be made to the presentation of the narrative. Split between past and present timelines, it feels like you’re getting two scary stories for the price of one. The past is presented as an apocalyptic drama, with a lot of characters trying to live in one space, attempting to figure out what’s happening to the rest of the world with limited information. In the present, we’re given a ghost story that takes place over the span of just a few hours journey – where you’re blindfolded in a boat with two other blindfolded children trying to find your way down river without being eaten or killed. All of this is shoved into an absurdly small amount of pages, which I believe was also intentional.

A Terrifying Art

Truly prolific horror takes something ubiquitous and associates it with something stressful. Five Nights at Freddy’s ripped on Chucky Cheese, Chucky was about creepy dolls (which almost all of us have in some form or another), and Psycho forever ruined showers for the remainder of human history. Haunted houses are so endemic in our scary stories because we all live in them. Malerman follows that same trend by making our eyes the enemy. Humans take almost 80% of their sensory data from sight when they can see well – but when we cannot only trust what we see but have to fear it making us violent and suicidal, so much can be lost in the span of only a few weeks.

For a time, it’s not clear if it is indeed some kind of creature causing this disturbance, but eventually, it appears that there is something out in the wilderness, walking the streets, either intentionally or unintentionally driving people to truly vicious acts of violence and self harm. Only a glimpse is enough to do it, and anything that has eyes and a brain seems effected – which leads to one of the most intense, heart-stopping sequences I’ve ever read in a book, and from which the title originates.

Thankfully, descriptions of these creatures is left vague, which is really the silver bullet of the horror genre. Because we have so little from the book to go off about the creatures, our imagination is completely responsible for their design, which makes them that much more terrifying. The only thing that’s used to describe them is infinity, or I would something so strange and surreal we’re unable to properly interpret what’s being seen, which seems to drive everything insane. Thus, I would call this definitively Lovecraftian in its make, something I was not prepared to do when I read this. Yet, from reading the painful account of the members of the house Malorie is living in, we certainly get that existential dread that’s indicative of his work, all without the hurtful biases and racism. It’s true I’ve been on a Lovecraft binge lately, but I had expected to break it with this book.

Yet, here we are.

The only demerit I could give the book has everything to do with me, and nothing to do about the book itself. I have to confess, I hate most apocalyptic fiction, either written or TV and movies. With a family and a wife and a love of technology, stories in those settings tend to depress me more than scare me. In this case, I was always more interested in Malorie’s river journey than about her past with the members of the safe house, it was really painful to read. But that’s only personal preference, I did end up reading all of those moments, and they were worth it.

But it will not make you feel good.

Summation

Despite that, the pain is worth it for a truly harrowing experience, masterfully crafted by Malerman. I immediately ran to my Goodreads and added more of his collection, and am looking forward to reading more by him in the near future. It absolutely ruined my sound sleep last night, but it was worth it for some thrilling moments that left me pounding my seat while I read from my phone. It also benefited my wife, who in her playful cruelty succeeded in scaring me half to death twice after I had finished the book.

Pick this one up, and prepare to get wrecked. And as always…

keep reading.