Into That Darkness

by Steven Price

"Acclaimed Canadian poet Steven Price has conjured a stunning debut novel that explores what we ask from each other, and how much we are prepared to give. Set in the city of Victoria, British Columbia, Into That Darkness opens at the moment when a massive earthquake hits the entire west coast with devastating results. Amid the destruction of the city, survivors are left to negotiate a calamity in which bonds of civility are pushed to their limits and often broken. When Arthur Lear hears a voice crying in the rubble, he finds himself descending deep under a collapsed building in a desperate attempt to save a young boy and his mother. But what he discovers there will change him forever - as circumstances lead him across the city's broken landscape, through the chaos of its hospitals and streets, in a harrowing search for the mother's lost daughter. Over the days that follow, Lear's very sense of humanness will be tested and compromised, as he faces the limits of himself and his fellow survivors, in his long journey home. A novel for our age of anxiety and fear, Steven Price delivers a powerful story about the physical manifestation of the darker things lurking in our culture, in ourselves."

Genres: Fiction, Canada, Dystopia, Literature, Horror, Adult Fiction, Literary Fiction

237 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 12, 2011

About the author

Steven Price is a Canadian poet and novelist.

He graduated from the University of Victoria with a BFA in 2000, and from the University of Virginia with an MFA, in poetry.

Price's first collection of poems, Anatomy of Keys (2006), won Canada's 2007 Gerald Lampert Award for Best First Collection, was short-listed for the BC Poetry Prize, and was named a Globe and Mail Book of the Year. His first novel, Into That Darkness (2011), was short-listed for the 2012 BC Fiction Prize. His second collection of poems, Omens in the Year of the Ox (2012), won the 2013 ReLit Award.

Price teaches poetry and fiction at the University of Victoria, where he lives with his partner, novelist Esi Edugyan.

Reviews

[Natalie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had to read this book for English class and skimmed through most of it because it's not a book I would usually manage to finish. The writing is full of sentence fragments and is a bit obvious in its yelling of theme: the word "darkness" generally appears at least three or four times every single page. Plus, there's no quotations, because who needs understandable dialogue markers when you could instead be totally taken out of the story every few minutes while you try to distinguish between the narrator and a speaker?

My main problem with this book though is its unrealistic darkness. Obviously a giant earthquake hitting Victoria would be awful and tragic. But Price portrays a Victoria that immediately becomes a raging mass of murderers and rapists and thugs, with people robbing each other left right and center and dogs that a few days ago were happy little house-trained puppies stalking survivors through the rubble, presumably with a mind towards eating them. It's just not the Victoria I know and love. Sure, we're not perfect, but I doubt we'd turn into a dystopia within hours of a disaster. Price fixates on the dark and the morbid with a determination that left me thinking: what the hell is the point?

The other thing that took me out of the plot and story was the massive chapter-long religious story that had nothing to do with anything. I get Price clearly wanted to muse on religion in this book but he could have made it relevant to the plot. It just seemed... obvious. It didn't connect to the story at all, and it was a massive chunk of text.

Overall... Well I'll be glad when my two weeks of having to talk about this book in English class are over.

[Susan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't enjoy this book. Perhaps that was partly because it was a little too close to home. The book is set in Victoria after a massive earthquake. The story centres around Arthur Lear who survives the quake and helps to dig a young boy out of the rubble. He then begins an odyssey with the boy as they search for his missing mother and sister. This story may be realistic but there was very little of mankind pulling together to survive this disaster and a lot of individuals taking advantage of the chaos to look out only for themselves no matter the cost to others.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

not one iota like "By Gaslight", that's for sure... this book will scrape the last vestiges of hope and happiness, and likely suck out your last breath too... wow, what a brutal story... i LOVED it... but i am rather dark and depressive and a firm believer humans are fucked up and not long for the planet they are ravaging... anyway, i digress... Price is a poet, and the writing in this book makes that crystal clear... powerful, tough, hard words throughout... not a lot of nice in this one, and any nice that arises is shat upon rather abruptly, then kicked into the ditch... "there probably isn't a heaven, but i'm reasonably sue hell is real"... yep... harrowing depictions of the evil that men (yes, men, not "men" as some sort of representation of humanity) are willing to do when tragedy strikes... sadly, it felt all too appropriate, as in our world males are the wielders of the sword, the swingers of the fist, the bringers of violence to poorly mask their hate and weakness and emotional immaturity... ugly truths, yes... sickening and woefully accurate descriptions of life as a female and/or a person of color... hard reading that... plenty of death, sadness, grief, awfulness, and meanness to fill a lot of dumpsters... a bit here and there about god and faith and the like, just enough to make you think but not so much as to seem preachy... the worst part about reading this book was the knowledge this is pretty much exactly how quickly too many males will revert to beasts and savages if/when this happens in real life, and how the females and the children will suffer the most and still make the best of things... the light at the end of this book's tunnel will burn your eyes out... highly recommended for those into realistic darkness...

[Lisa the Tech · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gorgeous atmosphere. You can tell the author's a poet. I understand many people are not impressed by his lack of quotations for dialogue. There was a time when I did not use quotations as well. I was eight. The lack of quotations is frustrating, but the imagery saves the book in the end.

[Jan · Rating 1 out of 5]

The setting for this debut novel by Mr. Price is the beautiful city of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.
Everyone I know has been to Victoria at least once. It is a truly beautiful city. But this is not a beautiful story.In this sad, dark, novel, The Big One,( the earthquake that the western coast of Canada and the USA have been waiting for), has happened. And it is as bad, if not worse, than what we have been led to expect.
This story begins just minutes before the earthquake erupts and we are introduced to the main characters: the old man, the woman and the boy. When Mr. Price started describing the old man, I thought he was going to be about 80. Turns out he is only 69. What??? This is not really an old man at all, at least not by today’s standards. The woman runs a coffee shop and the old man stops by for a coffee and notices that the woman’s son, the boy, is doing his homework at one of the tables.
Then the earthquake hits and these three people are thrown together for the duration of this story as the three of them search the ruined city looking for the woman’s 16 year old daughter, who was at school at the time of the earthquake.
This story has all the horror of the earthquakes we have seen on TV and the internet. The cruelty of man to man did not surprise me but the fact that the author did not see fit to balance the bad with some good disappointed me and depressed me. Looters, rapists, hoarders and murderers took advantage, or tried to take advantage of our trio no matter where they went. Except for the few exhausted doctors and nurses who manned the make-shift hospital, and a few overwhelmed firemen, I felt that these 3 people , who were just trying to get from one make-shift shelter to the next, were struggling against evil forces at all times.
I was so excited when I picked this book up because it was written by a Canadian about a beautiful Canadian City. But the excitement did not last. Disappointment sent in very early. When I finished the book, I felt the book was not yet finished. I went back and read the last chapter because I thought I had missed something. I hadn’t.

[Kyle · Rating 2 out of 5]

I got excited about this one, as it's a disaster novel set in my lovely Victoria BC! The novel starts just before a massive earthquake shakes the entire region, flattening Victoria to piles of rubble. The early pace is desperate as survival instincts take over, but it starts to slow down considerably as we learn more about the three main characters and their personal circumstances. Unfortunately, all three characters are pretty forlorn and seem very attuned to the misery and anarchy around them. In fact, the thing that bothered me the most about this novel was the portrayal of the city in the aftermath of the quake. The hostility, the wild unleashed aggression, the sheer primordial violence that seems to burst forth from its citizens within hours of the disaster, is mystifying to me -- did we all turn into thugs, serial killers, and rapists just because the lights went out? This isn't my Victoria. I had to keep double-checking the book cover to make sure I hadn't accidentally switched over to reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road. I also think that the book suffered from death by poetry -- there is a lot of visual imagery in the prose, which normally I can handle, but the constant doom and gloom makes the city unrecognizable, and it all starts to blend together after a while into a giant depressing montage of the gates to Hell. All that being said, it's not a bad book, it does give local readers a thrill about what a disaster here might look like, but it certainly didn't grab me the way I'd hoped. I get that the tough, gritty prose is supposed to add to the flavour, but I think the lack of dialogue quotation marks leads to a constant distraction for the reader, and I swear that every second adjective was "dark", "darkness", or "darkening". The ending was a let down, too. So overall, a bit of a lemon. Needed a bit more human compassion and empathy, and bit less 'fin du monde'.

[Alexis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought this book was amazing. It's quite a difficult read, because it deals with the after effects of an earthquake in Victoria. The central character, Arthur Lear is a 69-year-old man, who is trapped in the rubble. He hears sounds from a building nearby and ends up rescuing a boy. Together, the two search for the boy's family members.

This is a bleak and disturbing novel about what can happen in a natural disaster. Price is a poet, and that comes across in this novel. I didn't finish reading Cormac McCarthy's "The Road", but this book reminded me of the parts that I did read. I'd definitely read Price's next novel. This was a pretty amazing debut.

[Dorothy Lloyd]

I couldn't finish,I didn't like it.

[Jim Puskas · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title sums it up: This is a very dark place indeed. A darkness that lurks within the human spirit. Evil has been set loose. When the structures and rules that ordinarily govern society are suddenly removed, a vacuum is left, a place where depravity, greed and chaos take over. Disaster invariably sets in motion both the best and the worst examples of human behavior.
For those who, like myself loved By Gaslight: Here we have all the lugubrious and stringently atmospheric aspects of that fine novel but without the compelling story to provide entertainment value.
It’s immediately apparent that Price is a poet; many passages are pure poetry, presented in prose format. And much is revealed about the underlying realities of human experience, especially when under duress. He understood that in times of disaster what is true and what is untrue are sometimes one and the same.
I don’t believe I have ever read a book that is as unremittingly gloomy as this — unless it might be The Grapes of Wrath. This is unquestionably a brilliantly conceived and executed piece of work but be forewarned: If you are a person inclined to suffer from depression or you’re not currently in a relatively happy state of mind, you may want to give this one a pass, at least for now.

[Sharon · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title of this debut book is so appropriate as Steven Price manages to draw you into that darkness so powerfully! But then this novel is about an earthquake that hits the entire west coast of BC, in particular the city of Victoria. I can't stress how big an impact the novel had on me, the way it is written. Scary stuff to think all of it could happen one day.

[Apex157x · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly descriptive writing style

[Olivia Comier · Rating 2 out of 5]

so dark and depressing!

[Kathy · Rating 2 out of 5]

What a weird book. Some very oddly constructed sentences that I had to read several times and then still didn't understand them. The author over uses "Well" as his main character's dialogue.

[John · Rating 1 out of 5]

140 pages in and I couldn't care less about the characters or the story. Time to move on to something else.

[Crystal Proulx · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was such a hard book to read. I really had to push myself to finish it… the lack of quotation marks made it incredibly hard to follow with narrator/characters… overall it was quite boring.

[Robyn Roscoe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Into That Darkness is set in Victoria, BC, and tells of the days on and immediately following a series of massive earthquakes along the West Coast. Both Vancouver and Seattle are also significantly affected (as is most of Vancouver Island), but the focus on Victoria allows the focus on a narrower geography and one that is more familiar to the author. We are introduced to the main characters on the morning of the earthquake. Arthur is an older man (he's referred to as the old man, but at just 68, I don't consider him "old", just older) who heads out from home one morning for his usual stroll to the shops. He gets a coffee from Anna, who has her son Mason with her for the day. Arthur is at the tobacconists when the big tremor strikes. The remainder of the story is about Arthur, Anna, and Mason finding their way through and around and over the rubble, and the changed society that springs up within it.

Not knowing Victoria that well (but well enough to know the main landmarks), it was difficult to follow sometimes where the action was taking place - how close together or not things were. Regardless, the descriptions of the ruined city, especially the details around the wreck of the hospital and the refugees moving towards it, were sufficiently detailed to make the devastation clear and graphic. The characters were interesting but a bit disjointed, with many irrelevant and unenlightening details shared but other serious gaps left unaddressed. There were a few other issues I had with the novel:

The dialogue was both rambling and incomplete. There is a long (long) passage of Arthur telling Anna a fable about a scientist and a creationist that is a complete non sequitur and just ends with no explanation.
- There are extra characters with complex backstories that just come and go for no reason (the engineer, the gardener, the barber).
- As with By Gaslight, the author latches on to a few interesting descriptive words that then he can't stop using, sometimes on the same page. Warple (meaning wavy glass that distorts images), wimple (which he uses as an adjective to describe the slightly wavy surface of water or something that is wrinkled), and scurl (a made-up word that seems to mean wave or whorls of dust or cloud blown by the wind). These can be very distracting, but I now know that Price is foremost a poet, and so it make sense that his lyrical language permits imaginative imagery. Regardless, some better editing would have spread these words out a bit more.

Overall, the novel was good for its stark and grim setting, which is very well done, but the characters are strangely thin and unsympathetic, some of the elements of the societal changes they experience (organized and violent vigilantes cordoning off neighbourhoods within 12 hours, packs of now-wild dogs hunting people within 2 days) seem highly fantastic and unrealistic, and many of the actions and choices that the characters make are reminiscent of bad tv shows ("it's getting dark out there, we should split up now").

[April · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dark. What did I expect? The characters are deeply drawn, which is what motivated me to read this book in the first place. The author's keen skills at observation and communication provide what is exceptional about this book: intimate character portrayals and vivid description--the stuff of poetry. Did it get drawn out too long? Possibly. Was there enough light? I'm not sure. Was the extent of the darkness realistic? Probably. Was it a depressing book? Definitely. There were questions I had, some that were answered by the end of the book and some that weren't. These drove me to read on in a kind of dread of what I was going to find, all the while appreciating the subtleties of observation and language.

Are book club people going to be happy with my choice of book....Probably not. Is there stuff to talk about? Yes. In the manner of poetry, there are symbols and meaning in every line. I had to stop writing notes, because I was doing it for every page in the first couple of chapters! I think I would have liked something this dark and depressing served up in a poem, shorter and more easily contained. I guess in many ways, that is part of the "message" of this book--life isn't tied up in a meaningful, fair package. That's too bad.

[Liz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Out of visceral, disturbing moments comes a deep sense of hope. As is only appropriate for a disaster novel, Price reflects on the nature of God, suffering, good and evil. I found myself really drawn into the characters (and even cried at the end.) This may have something to do with me living in Victoria, but Price treats his subject with a surprising, moving gentleness and steers clear of shock-value manipulation. I'll definitely be thinking about "Into That Darkness" for a long time to come.

[Gillian · Rating 1 out of 5]

The word disappointment comes to mind when thinking about this book. I really enjoyed By Gaslight, also by Price, but this was ... not that. It speaks volumes that I can't remember the basic plot beyond there was an earthquake and people have to come together and is confusingly written and structured. I skimmed to get through it and returned it to the library two days after I checked it out. By Gaslight is 110% better than this.

[Vida · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tedious and depressing. Rather like a Saramago book in that something terrible happens and then the author explores humanity's darkness. Attempted to be poetic, but I think it missed the mark. Every other sentence seemed to be either "there was a darkness in his eyes" or "he saw something dark in his eyes." Ultimately, I was quite disappointed.

[Tamara Patterson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this book - but I think its because I live in Victoria where it takes place. This is hard to get out of your mind and describes life here through a few characters after an earthquake. I am glad I read it but if you have any fears about this, you would find it quite dark.

[Marie]

NOT FINISHED


i tried so hard with this book, its description was beautiful, you can see that the author was a poet before, but for me, it was simply like wading through treacle, cant rate it as i gave up.

[Jeannette Montgomery · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poet-turned-novelist makes for deliciously liquid prose: easy to ingest, and more filling than one might imagine on first blush. Heavy subject matter delivered with the skill only a poet can truly harness.

[Laura Elisabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Devastating. Review to come after some processing.

[Bonnie Schopfer · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love that the voice Steven Price wrote with was so different from the voice in his two poetry collections.

Price is a well-rounded and brilliant writer.

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very well written story about a massive earthquake that hits Victoria, BC, although the story was very dark at times.

[Sheena · Rating 3 out of 5]

8.6 Earthquake! Victoria! Very poetic and eerie book.

[Naomi McCormick · Rating 2 out of 5]

Don't bother. Read "the road" by mccarthy instead.

[Claire Garneau · Rating 4 out of 5]

The epitomy of beautiful melancholy.

[Cathy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Nothing good to say about this one at all.