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Journey Into Darkness
Front cover:
When vast lowering shadows blacken a sunlit sky, guard against the menace of the invisible intruder from space who kills - destroys.
Back cover:
A once handsome youth lay hidden behind a boulder on the isolated new England coast, his body hideously torn and a deep burn penetrating his chest...
The sky darkens and fills with vast shadows. A wild panic sweeps the beach as an alien shape forms in the sky for the barest instant...
They were being attacked, one by one, but how can you defend yourself from an enemy you cannot see, from a danger of unknown origin?
When vast lowering shadows blacken a sunlit sky, guard against the menace of the invisible intruder from space who kills - destroys.
Back cover:
A once handsome youth lay hidden behind a boulder on the isolated new England coast, his body hideously torn and a deep burn penetrating his chest...
The sky darkens and fills with vast shadows. A wild panic sweeps the beach as an alien shape forms in the sky for the barest instant...
They were being attacked, one by one, but how can you defend yourself from an enemy you cannot see, from a danger of unknown origin?
156 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1963
About the author
Frank Belknap Long
474 books104 followersAka Lyda Belknap Long.
Frank Belknap Long Jr. was a prolific American writer of horror fiction, fantasy, science fiction, poetry, gothic romance, comic books, and non-fiction. Though his writing career spanned seven decades, he is best known for his horror and science fiction short stories, including early contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos. During his life, Long received the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement (at the 1978 World Fantasy Convention), the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement (in 1987, from the Horror Writers Association), and the First Fandom Hall of Fame Award (1977).
Frank Belknap Long Jr. was a prolific American writer of horror fiction, fantasy, science fiction, poetry, gothic romance, comic books, and non-fiction. Though his writing career spanned seven decades, he is best known for his horror and science fiction short stories, including early contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos. During his life, Long received the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement (at the 1978 World Fantasy Convention), the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement (in 1987, from the Horror Writers Association), and the First Fandom Hall of Fame Award (1977).
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
March 26, 2013
This is an obscure, curious, funky little volume from 1967. It's a little bit horror and maybe a little bit science fiction and certainly not too well-written by today's standards, but a nice representative of the B-list books of the day. Much more psychological than was the norm. I wouldn't rank it among Long's best, but it was an interesting change of pace.
February 12, 2021
So this is the most infuriating book I’ve ever read.
A small point that I dislike is that all of the conversations are extremely unnatural, it’s so cringy. I also have no idea if this book takes place during one day or one year, I honestly couldn’t tell.
Anyway, this book is about a man, Kilmer, who arrives at a house to help a psychologist named Howland with his patients during the summer. Kilmer gets to know a girl named Joan. He was kind of stalking her/he saved her because he was watching her with his binoculars. Some strange experiment is happening at the house and at the same time some patients get murdered. Kilmer eventually decided that the most likely murderer is an alien that drives off of fear and a "mind-block" that lets you see something unreal because the reality is too scary for the brain to handle.
It ends with Kilmer and Joan being chased into a bunker by the monster. When Howland dies the monster does too, but only because Kilmer and Joan hide behind …a cube? I don’t know. And the police don't care about the murders (even though one police officer was murdered too). They find the diary from Howland, and every theory Kilmer had turned out to be correct. Oh, and let's not forget that all the patients who were there for some unknown mental illness are now feeling cured :) it was not traumatizing at all to learn that an alien was killing people with fear, nor seeing dead bodies with burned and torn apart limbs.
If a book would be seen as a ball of yarn where everything is knotted together nicely to form a story with no loose ends, then this books' yarn would be torn and poorly knotted and fringed and not resembling a ball at all. It's frustrating to read a book that is so all over the place. No character is likable, especially Mr perfect-explaining-everything-while-interrupting-girls Kilmer.
I can't put my finger on if Kilmer is simply delusional, or a complete megalomaniac. He keeps interrupting Joan midsentence, explaining everything as if she was 3 years old about subjects that bring absolutely nothing to the actual story, keeps saying that she doesn't make sense when it was just 2 seconds previous that he thought the same thing as her. And he always seems to think that he is right about everything and knows the most about every subject. Even when he isn't sure if he's right he still speaks as if he is in the right anyway. And when Joan finally gets to say something he seems to take credit for that too.
And I swear, those billion pages where Kilmer thinks about the color blue tried to suck the life out of my body.
Sure, that colors might affect the mind is an interesting idea. But to go from ”oh there’s a projector in this room that showed some pics that can make you go mad” and connecting that with the walls that have a specific shade of blue does not seem like a plausible reason to spiral into a million pages of the color blue and how other authors thinks about colors in a correspondence with fear. I do get that it’s a base for what the author wants the reader to be prepared for, it’s just that it felt extremely unnatural. And when he is done explaining to the reader about the color there is someone at the door who says they didn't want to disturb his thoughts, like how did she (Joan) know that he needed to finish his sentence to the ”audience” before she could interrupt.
Also, am I the only one who thinks it’s the most idiotic thing that Joan watched 3 fishermen on a boat, 1 gets murdered and the other 2 swim to shore and then does nothing about it. It’s described as terrifying to witness as the mist attacks those men. But then, Joan does not go to the fishermen to see if they are alright, she goes back to her friend – I thought for help – but no, they just sit in the sand and talk about Kilmer's theories, because let’s get real – Joan does not have anything to say according to him. And they just leave the fishermen for dead. If they are so interested in what the cloud was then why not ask the men what they experienced?
But then again, the book never mentioned them again so maybe the fishermen were part of the alien-being to try to scare them? Which wouldn’t make sense, the alien seems to only take the form of an actual being who is scary, and not making up a whole scenario about how someone who got killed and 2 survived. But I don’t get how the alien thing works. It supposedly scares people because the human mind has a block that imagines something else when it sees something too scary to handle. But if the alien is driven by fear and doesn’t seem to be able to just jump on someone, then how come all of the victims have a lot of wounds? Is the block an actual wall that keeps the alien at a distance? It doesn’t make sense. And either way. I think the author, or Kilmer, misunderstood what that other author, who they call Jung (whoever that is), meant with how people in the past felt about fear. I haven't read their work, but I don't think the mind would see a murderer down the street and being so scared that you see a vampire/werewolf or whatever instead. It’s like on page 129 where they stop in the middle of a dark staircase leading to a ”mysterious bunker” while being pursued by the alien because Kilmer needed to think about the fear that cavemen and Neanderthals had, that they too would have had the mind-block when they were inside caves because there would be something more terrifying inside that their minds imagined being something different than what was. However, I think the reason why people in the past believed in vampires, etc, was to scare children to not get lost in the woods/be aware of strangers that can kill them. I don’t think it’s a literal wall that distances itself from scary images. I do not see how Kilmer thought that Neanderthals had anything to do with anything, but I don’t think that they were scared of the darkness in caves in the same way we are today or how people in the recent past were afraid of vampires.
I usually enjoy books that are obscure and doesn't make sense, books that you have to read between the lines to figure out what stuff MIGHT mean, but this is only frustrating.
I wrote down so many examples while reading of all the stupid things, like when Joan saw a worm and Kilmer just interrupts her and says ”you sure it wasn’t a snake?”, and all the times they are scared out of their minds but stop just to think or talk. This book is filled to the brink with frustrating moments that I want to bring up because they make me mad, but I am not going to because this review will become longer than the actual book.
Alright, my final thoughts:
Journey Into Darkness sounds like one of those stories I wrote as a child where the idea of the story is interesting but it's not only poorly written and has an ending (as I would’ve written it) "then a bomb fell and everybody dies". Not everyone dies in this story, and there is no bomb like in my old stories, but it sure ends in the same kind of ultimately uninspired way that only happens when an author seems tired of their own story and just wants it to end. I hope nobody else has to read this book. I wouldn't give it to my worst enemy.
A small point that I dislike is that all of the conversations are extremely unnatural, it’s so cringy. I also have no idea if this book takes place during one day or one year, I honestly couldn’t tell.
Anyway, this book is about a man, Kilmer, who arrives at a house to help a psychologist named Howland with his patients during the summer. Kilmer gets to know a girl named Joan. He was kind of stalking her/he saved her because he was watching her with his binoculars. Some strange experiment is happening at the house and at the same time some patients get murdered. Kilmer eventually decided that the most likely murderer is an alien that drives off of fear and a "mind-block" that lets you see something unreal because the reality is too scary for the brain to handle.
It ends with Kilmer and Joan being chased into a bunker by the monster. When Howland dies the monster does too, but only because Kilmer and Joan hide behind …a cube? I don’t know. And the police don't care about the murders (even though one police officer was murdered too). They find the diary from Howland, and every theory Kilmer had turned out to be correct. Oh, and let's not forget that all the patients who were there for some unknown mental illness are now feeling cured :) it was not traumatizing at all to learn that an alien was killing people with fear, nor seeing dead bodies with burned and torn apart limbs.
If a book would be seen as a ball of yarn where everything is knotted together nicely to form a story with no loose ends, then this books' yarn would be torn and poorly knotted and fringed and not resembling a ball at all. It's frustrating to read a book that is so all over the place. No character is likable, especially Mr perfect-explaining-everything-while-interrupting-girls Kilmer.
I can't put my finger on if Kilmer is simply delusional, or a complete megalomaniac. He keeps interrupting Joan midsentence, explaining everything as if she was 3 years old about subjects that bring absolutely nothing to the actual story, keeps saying that she doesn't make sense when it was just 2 seconds previous that he thought the same thing as her. And he always seems to think that he is right about everything and knows the most about every subject. Even when he isn't sure if he's right he still speaks as if he is in the right anyway. And when Joan finally gets to say something he seems to take credit for that too.
And I swear, those billion pages where Kilmer thinks about the color blue tried to suck the life out of my body.
Sure, that colors might affect the mind is an interesting idea. But to go from ”oh there’s a projector in this room that showed some pics that can make you go mad” and connecting that with the walls that have a specific shade of blue does not seem like a plausible reason to spiral into a million pages of the color blue and how other authors thinks about colors in a correspondence with fear. I do get that it’s a base for what the author wants the reader to be prepared for, it’s just that it felt extremely unnatural. And when he is done explaining to the reader about the color there is someone at the door who says they didn't want to disturb his thoughts, like how did she (Joan) know that he needed to finish his sentence to the ”audience” before she could interrupt.
Also, am I the only one who thinks it’s the most idiotic thing that Joan watched 3 fishermen on a boat, 1 gets murdered and the other 2 swim to shore and then does nothing about it. It’s described as terrifying to witness as the mist attacks those men. But then, Joan does not go to the fishermen to see if they are alright, she goes back to her friend – I thought for help – but no, they just sit in the sand and talk about Kilmer's theories, because let’s get real – Joan does not have anything to say according to him. And they just leave the fishermen for dead. If they are so interested in what the cloud was then why not ask the men what they experienced?
But then again, the book never mentioned them again so maybe the fishermen were part of the alien-being to try to scare them? Which wouldn’t make sense, the alien seems to only take the form of an actual being who is scary, and not making up a whole scenario about how someone who got killed and 2 survived. But I don’t get how the alien thing works. It supposedly scares people because the human mind has a block that imagines something else when it sees something too scary to handle. But if the alien is driven by fear and doesn’t seem to be able to just jump on someone, then how come all of the victims have a lot of wounds? Is the block an actual wall that keeps the alien at a distance? It doesn’t make sense. And either way. I think the author, or Kilmer, misunderstood what that other author, who they call Jung (whoever that is), meant with how people in the past felt about fear. I haven't read their work, but I don't think the mind would see a murderer down the street and being so scared that you see a vampire/werewolf or whatever instead. It’s like on page 129 where they stop in the middle of a dark staircase leading to a ”mysterious bunker” while being pursued by the alien because Kilmer needed to think about the fear that cavemen and Neanderthals had, that they too would have had the mind-block when they were inside caves because there would be something more terrifying inside that their minds imagined being something different than what was. However, I think the reason why people in the past believed in vampires, etc, was to scare children to not get lost in the woods/be aware of strangers that can kill them. I don’t think it’s a literal wall that distances itself from scary images. I do not see how Kilmer thought that Neanderthals had anything to do with anything, but I don’t think that they were scared of the darkness in caves in the same way we are today or how people in the recent past were afraid of vampires.
I usually enjoy books that are obscure and doesn't make sense, books that you have to read between the lines to figure out what stuff MIGHT mean, but this is only frustrating.
I wrote down so many examples while reading of all the stupid things, like when Joan saw a worm and Kilmer just interrupts her and says ”you sure it wasn’t a snake?”, and all the times they are scared out of their minds but stop just to think or talk. This book is filled to the brink with frustrating moments that I want to bring up because they make me mad, but I am not going to because this review will become longer than the actual book.
Alright, my final thoughts:
Journey Into Darkness sounds like one of those stories I wrote as a child where the idea of the story is interesting but it's not only poorly written and has an ending (as I would’ve written it) "then a bomb fell and everybody dies". Not everyone dies in this story, and there is no bomb like in my old stories, but it sure ends in the same kind of ultimately uninspired way that only happens when an author seems tired of their own story and just wants it to end. I hope nobody else has to read this book. I wouldn't give it to my worst enemy.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 17, 2026
1.0
i got this years ago without knowing what it’s about bc it was cheap but oh my god this was so bad.
it was interesting to see sci-fi writing from that time, but the writing was not good 😭 the dialogue was so awful because it was technically monologue after monologue, one of the male characters kept interrupting the female characters and worst of all nothing actually happened. there was zero excitement!!
the only good thing about this book was that i read it while on a trip to paris with friends
February 11, 2026
“That sounds like a dog!” she said, her voice hoarse with anxiety. “But—Oh, God, what if it isn’t?”
In Frank Belknap Long's Journey into Darkness, a group of individuals with psychological struggles gathers at a remote New England clifftop house. What begins as a scientific experiment in "consciousness expansion" quickly descends into a supernatural nightmare as an alien horror is unleashed.
In Frank Belknap Long's Journey into Darkness, a group of individuals with psychological struggles gathers at a remote New England clifftop house. What begins as a scientific experiment in "consciousness expansion" quickly descends into a supernatural nightmare as an alien horror is unleashed.
March 8, 2026
This book was not good. At times, I thought it was akin to Lovecraft. It tried to instill the fear of the unknown (like Lovecraft), but it was extremely long winded and never came to that point. I don’t think I have ever fallen asleep reading a book as many times as I fell asleep reading this one. Save your efforts for another book.
October 24, 2018
Feel like I missed something. Will reread in the future.
Did Not Finish
May 21, 2026I have this book 40 pages. It’s all over the place and poorly written. Pass.
November 29, 2025
Despite buying it for its cover and not expecting much, I'm disappointed. The sentence structure of the first chapter was tough to process, forcing me to digest the prose at a snail's pace. After that, the narrative smoothed out, with only the occasional pause-giving sentence. (Howland is a completely different character than we're initially led to expect.) But just as I was feeling mildly intrigued by the plot, it derailed, crashing and burning before my helpless eyes. The sheriff's death spelled the end for my almost-enjoyment. The author was close to something interesting, and tossed it out the window. We could have had a cozy little paranormal seaside murder mystery, but no. We're instead treated to idiotic conversations about Jung's silly theories, a deadly color, and a non-Euclidean shape from another dimension and potential mental defenses against it.
Once the sheriff is offed, the narrative becomes highly erratic. It jumps to a seven-year-old boy's dune exploration, which adds nothing to the story, but eventually leads us back to Joan and Kilmer. Then, to a completely random discussion between the remaining houseguests. And finally, back to Joan and Kilmer at the dunes. (An unspecified amount of time passes between these chapters.) They flee into an abandoned fallout shelter, encounter the "alien encroachment" one last time, defeat it by hiding behind a cube (that's right), and return to the house. The end.
This was perhaps unique to my experience, but my ignorance of aquatic biology struck again (and so soon after "The Water-Babies"). So when Kilmer saw a vision of a "skate" with a human face, I mistakenly pictured a colossal ice skate solemnly emerging from among the parting clouds, its toe box a tortured caricature of a man's face, its lace unfurled weightlessly on either side like shoe-store banderoles hoisted by a pair of as yet invisible putti. The image will forever be with me...
...
Some typos:
"He had even appeared to somewhat dazed..." (p. 67)
-
"It wouldn't be an exaggeration to call him one of the five of six foremost psychologists in America." (p. 81)
-
"We'll have to have some photographs and we may as well make sure this time that the inguest evidence isn't given to the jury second-hand." (p. 83)
...
Use of "here and there": 1
...
4/10
Once the sheriff is offed, the narrative becomes highly erratic. It jumps to a seven-year-old boy's dune exploration, which adds nothing to the story, but eventually leads us back to Joan and Kilmer. Then, to a completely random discussion between the remaining houseguests. And finally, back to Joan and Kilmer at the dunes. (An unspecified amount of time passes between these chapters.) They flee into an abandoned fallout shelter, encounter the "alien encroachment" one last time, defeat it by hiding behind a cube (that's right), and return to the house. The end.
This was perhaps unique to my experience, but my ignorance of aquatic biology struck again (and so soon after "The Water-Babies"). So when Kilmer saw a vision of a "skate" with a human face, I mistakenly pictured a colossal ice skate solemnly emerging from among the parting clouds, its toe box a tortured caricature of a man's face, its lace unfurled weightlessly on either side like shoe-store banderoles hoisted by a pair of as yet invisible putti. The image will forever be with me...
...
Some typos:
"He had even appeared to somewhat dazed..." (p. 67)
-
"It wouldn't be an exaggeration to call him one of the five of six foremost psychologists in America." (p. 81)
-
"We'll have to have some photographs and we may as well make sure this time that the inguest evidence isn't given to the jury second-hand." (p. 83)
...
Use of "here and there": 1
...
4/10
June 10, 2014
This book is an odd mix of Lovecraft, Carl Jung and 1950's sci-fi "B movie" dialogue. Characters stumble upon bizarre, difficult-to-grasp situations and sort of intuitively figure out what is going on, and explain things to one another in info dump conversations. Also, Long has no real idea how police investigations work, and it shows in this book. Still, it is a fun read if you can overlook such flaws.
February 26, 2015
1987 grade D-
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews