Dark Room

There are moments in Steve Mosby's "Dark Room" where the tension becomes almost unbearable, but even in its quieter passages - in some cases quietly beautiful and beautifully touching - you feel uneasy. Something just beneath the surface, just out of sight, something locked away in the dark room is restless and turning in the blood warm darkness.


A synopsis of the plot that didn't contain spoilers, would do the book an injustice. All the usual elements of a crime novel are there - a brutal and cryptic series of murders, a charismatic detective with more baggage than an Hungarian billionaire - and the story unfolds to the astonishment of this reader at least like a magic trick performed right under his nose. The plot twists and turns less than his earlier books, but there is much to keep you thinking. Better, there is much to keep you thoughtful.

The setting of this and Mosby's other novels is familiar but otherworldly. His unspecific european city inhabits a point adrift in space and time -  a near future being dragged back down beneath the cold waves by a thousand years of mistakes and secrets. In this world of anonymous concrete tower blocks and wind-waved grasslands the past can never be escaped, but it seems to hold important clues. If one can stand to look at it long enough without flinching there might be answers there. Maybe.

Swain Woods - the backdrop for one of many unforgettable scenes - is a place I played in when I was a child. In reality it's maybe less than a kilometre from end to end. But in Dark Room as in my imagination, it rolls on to the horizon. There are wild animals in Mosby's version too, wolves probably, with great big teeth the better to eat you with. This is a folk tale - the abandoned underworld the detectives visit briefly is called Trolls East - with its roots planted deep in the human psyche, pale searching roots that infiltrate the dark places within us.

And what dark depths these are. It would be hard to describe them here without giving anything away, but the mere mention of the Yellow Man - a character from an earlier book - appears like a blight on the page, something malignant and festering, hard to look at, but impossible to turn away from.

I thought several times of Larkin's dismal line that "man hands on misery to man". In the Dark Room the stain of original sin is passed on down the male line like a treasured heirloom, passing from father to son. At least with the original original sin there seemed to be a plan, here there might not even be that. A Son could die for it and we would never know why. Coincidences and connections layer over each other. Patterns form out of the static and dissolve again.

There is comfort there for those who seek it, there may even be a purpose to it all, but at the end of this excellent book one needs to think very, very carefully about the words 'happily ever after'.