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4.0 out of 5 stars
Flawed but Readable Walk on the Weird Side, Jul 13 2004
Darkness Demands is a tense and compulsively readable little tale of things that go bump in the cemetery. It hews closely to genre conventions, but enjoyably so - a nice old-fashioned creepy gothic by a highly competent wordsmith. The finest thing in the book is the Necropolis itself, the sprawling Victorian city of the dead from which written demands for this and that emanate to the unfortunate neighbors. Clark's writing is really at its finest in his descriptions of this uncanny location, and the Necropolis is more vividly characterized than any of the actual people in the book (Clark's characters are serviceable but not memorable). I really enjoyed prowling the cemetery's weedy byways and abandoned rail station, and it's here that the story is most original and unnerving. A few things undermine Darkness Demands - for one, the aftermath of a small child's murder is described in profoundly nasty detail. This occurs as part of a minor subplot and does nothing to advance the plot or the atmosphere of this otherwise restrained and elegant novel, which generally doesn't rely on the gratuitous gross-out to achieve its effects. I might be oversensitive as the parent of a small child myself, but I just didn't need to know which body parts were found in the little boy's potty. More importantly, the ending is, as other reviewers have noticed, unsatisfying. Rather than the epic confrontation between fear and courage, selfishness and altruism, the greater good and the individual, the human and ... gulp! ... the inhuman that the book has been promising us all along, we get a wet little fart of a conclusion. Not only is this disappointing, but it means that the book ditches any of the bigger themes it flirts with in favor of a "Ooh, look, full circle to the opening paragraphs" cutesy wrap-up. In all conscience I can't award the book a full five stars, but lovers of spectral horror will still find Darkness Demands a pleasantly uneasy read.
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