The Dark Will End the Dark

by Darrin Doyle

A group of tugboat passengers grapples with a disturbing loss. A record-holding hiccuper confronts his condition—and a troubling secret. A wife wonders what to do when her husband’s head stops working—but his body stays alive. A man struggles with the memory of the time he saw his friend swallowed whole by a neighborhood girl with supernatural powers.


In this classic set of Midwestern Gothic stories by Darrin Doyle, we see the strange hold hands with the familiar—and seem all the more strange as a result. A set of tall tales (and medium-height ones) told with Nabokovian prose, this stunning and visceral collection by the author of The Beast in Aisle 34 will linger long after the last page.


Originally published in 2015, this revised tenth anniversary edition features a new introduction by American Mythology author Giano Cromley.

Genres: Short Stories

220 pages, Paperback

Published October 7, 2025

About the author

Darrin Doyle is the author of the novella Let Gravity Seize the Dead (Regal House), the novels The Beast in Aisle 34 (Tortoise Books), The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo (St. Martin’s Press), and Revenge of the Teacher’s Pet: A Love Story (LSU Press), and the short story collections The Big Baby Crime Spree and Other Delusions (Wolfson Press), The Dark Will End the Dark, and Scoundrels Among Us (Tortoise Books). He lives in Mount Pleasant, Michigan and teaches at Central Michigan University.

Reviews

[Lori]

I'm the publicist for this title and we're super excited to be celebrating the 10 year anniversary of The Dark Will End the Dark. If you are interested in reviewing it, interviewing Darrin, or featuring him and the book in other creative ways, please DM me!

[Charlotte Lennox · Rating 3 out of 5]

I went in expecting a more absolute horror, as I plucked it off of the dedicated horror shelf at Barnes & Noble. The back of the book even had such terms as “troubling secrets”, “disturbing loss”, and “supernatural powers”. While there were some stories that were indeed horror, many- maybe even most- were not something that would typically be considered so. They were dark, atmospheric, and explored subjectively frightening themes, but not, you know, a real “horror story”. While I do feel a bit misled in the representation of this book, I recalibrated my expectations for it while reading and was able to overall enjoy it.

There are a variety of stories in this collection. I wouldn’t call it “all over the place” as I fear it would have a negative connotation (and I like variety!), but the stories were hit or miss for me. The author also experimented, to varying degrees of success, with different writing styles. Some more palatable than others. I appreciate the experimentation, though I personally don’t like when style sacrifices readability. I enjoyed reading most of the stories in the moment, but honestly none of them stick out after a while. A good short story, for me, rears its head in your mind randomly after days, weeks, even months or years after you’ve read it. I don’t think I will find myself ruminating on these stories in the coming months. I wouldn’t recommend not reading the book, but I just hope that those who do will resonate with it more.

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

While presenting stories that may initially seem to explore aspects and struggles of the familiar, relatively common, or trials of everyday life, the fifteen short stories in The Dark Will End The Dark by Darrin Doyle include an additional layer of weirdness to the narratives presented that converts each tale into something much more hauntingly strange, eerie, or shocking, often through an emphasis on bodily horror or visceral situations that would give an ordinary person reason to be disconcerted.

To read this, and other book reviews, visit my website: http://makinggoodstories.wordpress.com/.

Within this collection are stories that depict, to different degrees, the dark, grotesque, strange, and/or weird aspects of a human, or supernatural, body in a way that delivers a punchy, shocking effect, leaving lingering thoughts and a mental sensation of “what!?” that may make a reader uncomfortable and unsettled but compelled nonetheless. Though not all the stories in the collection are directly body stories, a majority are titled after body parts, and they all generally have strong ties to a bodily function or part that’s described in detail at some point in the tale. Offering variety in length and pacing to the individual stories, as some are extremely short and to the point with no extraneous prose while others take a bit more time to develop out the situation and scene, each one does a thorough and vivid job of building a sense of eeriness, which helps foster a cohesion to the collection, in addition to the common threads of a moving company making an appearance across many stories and the Michigan and/or Midwest locale emphasis.

*I received a copy of this book from the author in exchange for an honest review.

[Chrisgonzo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not sure how to describe this odd little collection of stories. The cover suggests horror fiction, but while there *is* horror here, it's bizzare and subtle and deeply unsettling at times, and fuzzy at the edges. Reminiscent of David Lynch's atmospherics, I suspect there will be those who hate it and those who love it, but I doubt there will be much middle ground, which is a sure sign (to my mind, at any rate), of a talented writer following his muse rather than the dollar signs.