Book Review: "We Ate the Dark" by Mallory Pearson

“I want to feel safe, and I want to have a future. I don’t want to be like my mother. I don’t want to depend on my friends to hold me together in place of the real thing and still manage to lose it all in the end.”

I found this book hanging around my Amazon Recommendations and so, interested in the title from the outset, I thought I would give it a go. I read the prologue before I bought it and man was that something. Honestly, this is one of those times where I amg glad I listened to my gut about what is and is not going to be a good book. This is a very, very good modern horror novel. If you read just the prologue to begin with then you will know what I mean too. Just take a read of this for a summary: in this prologue, a terrified boy graduating from high school named Alex goes to a house that looks really off with Tommy. He witnesses all the creaks and cracks but then he sees it. A tree growing through a skeletal corpse. And my interest has thus been peaked. Let's take a look at the book...

Now, the storyline sounds absolutely awesome: a girl named Sofia has been missing for several years by the point that her friends (all strange and uncomfortable) come together to try and find out what happened. The first one is Frankie who is Sofia's twin, the next three are Cass, Poppy and Marya. As they begin to investigate though, things start to go bump in the night and in the day and secrets that were not supposed to come to light are finding the surface. I'm not going to say too much about the storyline because I do not want to ruin the reveals for you but I do have to say that from the prologue to the final page, this book really does have the quality of new horror without all the weird clichés we are, as readers, sick of by now.

Secondly, we have the writing. Mallory Pearson has a particularly poetic writing style which makes the book really readable and also makes it easily accessible to everyone who loves descriptive atmospheres and those who do not. Mallory Pearson seems to find the perfect balance between description and action but the building of atmosphere is something that is really particular of this book. Atmosphere seems to be the big thumbs up of this book as it brings all of tension, the darkness, the horror and more. It is a brilliant feature of the style of the writer that I hope to read more of as time goes on.

Thirdly, we have the ending, and this is where it goes a little awry. The ending is not amazing and I feel like it could have been a lot slower, carried down the stairs rather than kicked down them, written and weaved into the denouement of the book rather than ended the way it was. But, I can't complain because the rest of the book seems to have such glowing ambition that I think I could forgive it if the author promises to work on those endings. Maybe, just maybe, the book ends too fast because you find yourself entrapped by the secrecy of the novel. I cannot decide.

All in all, I think this is a great new horror novel which doesn't just have the tension and darkness of horror but also uses interweaving storylines to tell us the narrative's past and present. It uses the drama of friendships and the mystery of identities to give the reader a great amount of information whilst leaving out the key information that we will undoubtedly find out on the way through the novel. Honestly, I think this is the start of a new great author of dramatic, atmospheric, tense horror rather than the gore-fest horror that we are (as you can probably tell from my review of the book The Playground) sick to death of by now. I was actually quite surprised that I liked this book but here we are. And I hope it goes somewhere.