Review: Darkness on the Edge of Town

Darkness on the Edge of Town by Brian Keene
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a 3-Star review. That's a good description of my experience.

Residents of a town discover that a dark curtain has descended on their town. The curtain blocks out the sun, moon, and stars. No one that enters the curtain ever returns. Those that enter it can be heard screaming in agony...for a time.

Faced with living for some unknown time confined with their neighbors, the town quickly...and in my opinion a little bit inexplicably....becomes self-destructive. It is suggested that the force behind the curtain is telepathically encouraging the self-destruction. The book doesn't provide enough context for each individual to know if that force is planting an new seed of destruction or encouraging something that was already there. As a group of humans, it seems like it was something already there. But we never get to meet most of the characters before the curtain came down, so it is impossible to know how they have fundamentally changed after it came down.

This is sort of a cross between Lord of the Flies and Stephen King's Beneath the Dome. In fact, this book was published a few months after Beneath the Dome.

I was halfway through the book before I had enough interest to want to finish it. I'm a huge fan of the author's podcast and wanted to give his books a try.

There were very few reasons to have any emotion for or against any of the characters. They have little history upon which to base an emotional connection.

There isn't any real building of suspense. The dark curtain falls. Things become steadily, progressively worse. There really aren't any huge surprises once we get to the worst condition. The violence borders on being mundane because it is expected.

While I'm sure that I'll be reading more of the author's work, I have no desire to revisit this book.


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