Don’t Eat the Dark

Pretend for a moment you’re a high school teacher grading term papers. You’re reading the work of a student that shows potential but doesn’t try hard. You can tell that this particular student composed two and a half pages of decent material but filled the rest of the assignment with frivolous filler words and repeated sentences so they could meet the minimum ten page requirement. That’s what reading “We Ate the Dark” was like.

“We Ate the Dark” is filled with an excess of flowery language. Adjectives and adverbs abound. While such parts of speech are not evil in small doses and they’re essential in some circumstances. However, the author here uses both to the point of absurdity, distracting from the actual story. She often employs multiple adjectives to describe one noun then continues to throw in some nonsensical similes and metaphors just for unwarranted measure. Like it wasn’t enough for her to say “the sun made everything gold” - she added a word saying “the sun made everything a violent gold.” And that’s the least harmless example. Every time a character saw the sky she had to describe it with a Parthenon of descriptors. Every human body part from fingertips to hair had to be verbally illustrated with over the top comparisons to the point of being inane and redundant. I’m sure she’s trying to flex her mastery of the English language but it comes across as storytelling ineptitude. She breaks the ‘show don’t tell’ rule like she’s hellbent on pissing off every editor in the publishing industry.

The author does not know when to quit. At one point she described something as appearing like a mirage then went on to explain what a mirage was, as if she wanted to use the metaphor but had to define the metaphor and employed extra adjectives to describe the definition. It’s all so unnecessary and the repetition is exhausting. Speaking of repeating vocabulary, she really likes the word sanguine. I understand using it once or twice but the quantity of its inclusion was garish.

There are two things that characters did over and over throughout the book: bite their lips until they’re red and dig fingernails into their palms until they bleed. Does she not know any other way to portray anxiety or stress? She spent an entire chapter repeatedly telling readers the main character was mad and wants to tell everyone why but never does it. In another chapter, several characters tilted their heads up at least a dozen times. But not just that chapter - they tilted their heads up countless times throughout the book. If I ever read the phrase “tilted her head up” in any other book I might enter a rage filled fugue state. I even used the ctrl+f function in my manuscripts to make sure that phrase doesn’t appear in any of the books I have written/am writing.

The unnecessary ornate language and never-ending repetition are not the author’s only literary sins. One side character isn’t given a name until the book is almost over. The story is told through multiple third person viewpoints except for one chapter about 90% of the way through the book when she painfully transitions to a plural first person narrative with a mix of “we” and “our” pronouns as the narrator. And the big climatic scene concludes with that bizarre chapter. While the rest of the book is over-described, the first person POV chapter is under-described. It’s so vague it seems the author didn’t know how to explain what was happening so she filled the pages with the literary equivalent of over-saturated terrible CGI common in big dumb action movies. She created an oversaturated story with detailed imagery of every miniscule item, texture and flavor permeating every page, only to give readers a blurry, meaningless, and confusing climax.

After that, the final 10% of the book was used for … I don’t know actually. I guess she intended it to tie up loose ends but no loose ends were actually wrapped into a bow. Most writers use this section of the three act structure to ramp down the action and resolve conflict. This author polluted her closing chapters by creating additional conflicts. Instead of completing storylines, the author creates new ones. One of the wrap up chapters contained a lengthy and pointless flashback of a main character. Then the next chapter presented another flashback (shorter but still frivolous) from a different character. Some side characters were theoretically present during this elongated closing but often ignored as if they were absent. In the end, there is no end. The story stops abruptly, a cliffhanger but not the good kind. It’s the most unsatisfying ‘the end’ imaginable. I’m sure the author was intentionally trying to set up a sequel or multiple sequels which (if they do or ever will exist) I have no interest in reading.

This is perhaps the worst book I’ve ever read, mind numbing from the beginning and torturous until the final page. Why did I continue to the next page and the next one and the next once I realized it was nothing more than a steaming pile of horse manure topped with a glittery bow? Is it masochism? Is it an unhealthy desire to finish anything I start no matter how unbearable?

No. I read the whole book because underneath the mountains of fluff and filler is a molehill of a good story. A murder mystery with queer representation, an alternate world, redneck fantasy, and magical realism. Despite my efforts to guess the culprit, I was wrong. While the reveal of the real perpetrator was anticlimactic, I was still surprised. Thematically, the book approaches topics of grief, trust, isolation, rejection, abandonment, and betrayal within the confines of a chosen family which are all worthy and valuable discussions unfortunately ham-fisted in “We Ate the Dark.”

Half of a star out of ten. It would have been better as a short story instead of a novel. The skeleton of a decent story is the only thing saving this book from a zero star rating.