I picked up After the Darkness by Honey Brown for a few reasons. First, I'd heard very good things about her debut novel Red Queen (which I still want to read but have yet to get my hands on), second, it was only $3 on iBooks, third, it sounded like something I could count towards my new Aussie Horror Reading Challenge and finally, I read the sample and had to keep reading. This review contains vague, non-essential spoilers.

After the Darkness is the story of married couple with three kids, Trudy and Bruce, told from Trudy's point of view. On the way home from a holiday away from the kids down the Great Ocean Road, the couple stop at a small art gallery on a whim. The art is creepy and Trudy has a bad feeling the entire time they're there. A feeling that's entirely vindicated when the owner-artist drugs and assaults them. They escape and the bulk of the narrative is about them dealing with the repercussions of what happened in the gallery.

There is a lot of interesting psychology in this book. Bruce was victimised (and fair warning: tortured and sexually assaulted, mostly off the page) to a greater extent than Trudy and had a harder time coping with it after the fact. Which isn't to say that Trudy didn't have post-traumatic stress flashbacks. Initially, though, Trudy was the one that had to hold everything together. A nice change from the woman being the greater victim. In that respect, it's also a story about how the patriarchy society makes it harder for men to express their feelings and talk about their vulnerability. I strongly feel that if their victim-roles had been reversed, the story of their respective coping would have played out very differently.

Although the book is called After the Darkness, it's really about how hard it is to leave the darkness behind. This paragraph, just as they're making their escape, highlights the early struggles they face:

The terror actually heightened as we left. The open garage gaped behind us. My body grew rigid. It was difficult to steer or accelerate. I think a part of me knew even then that we weren't leaving, not really. Some things you don't escape from.

It's also about how darkness is often contagious, touching on the way in which abuse victims often go on to re-enact their trauma as a way of coming to terms with it. And the hopelessness that comes with fearing for your life. And having to relate to people in a life you have to pretend is normal. This line illustrates that sentiment nicely, when Trudy is trying to relate to her friends again:

Brutality somehow managed to make a mockery of everything that was not brutal.

The prose in After the Darkness was lovely. From the beginning, before anything bad happens, when I knew Brown was sprinkling in a bit of mundane normality for later comparison, I was immediately engaged. Trudy and Bruce started off as a happy couple, which deteriorated into a traumatised couple later on. However, I liked that their experience didn't drive a wedge between them. They hadn't suffered in the same way, but they didn't drift apart in their suffering. Indeed, the fact that the other was the only one who could come close to understanding what happened, kept them close.

It's debatable how much of a horror book this is and how much psychological drama or thriller. But there's a lot of the feeling of creeping dread (which I think is my new favourite term for describing horror), and many horrific elements, coming both from within and without, so I would definitely class it as horror. Which isn't to say readers of crime or contemporary books won't enjoy it and count it within their genres.

I highly recommend After the Darkness to anyone after a creepy read. I read it quite quickly and found it difficult to put down. I think it will appeal broadly to readers of several genres, particularly those that enjoy their creepiness and psychological drama in a contemporary Australian setting.

4.5 / 5 stars

You can read more of my reviews on my blog. ( )

I'd been wanting to read After The Darkness for months and Thrill Week finally provided the perfect opportunity. I picked it up to read a few chapters before bedtime and found myself, at 3am, turning the final page.

In After the Darkness, Trudy and Bruce Harrison are on their way home after a relaxing week away when a sign for the Ocean View Gallery captures their attention. Stepping inside the unusual building they are confronted by a maze of rooms and disquieting sculptures of glass, wood and stone. They dismiss their feelings of unease, admiring the breathtaking vista of the ocean, and accept the gallery owner's offer of coffee. Just minutes later, Bruce is unconscious and as Trudy fights to rouse her husband she is blinded with chemical spray and then bound. Disorientated and terrified the couple are at the mercy of their sadistic captor but with strength born from abject fear they manage to kill the man and escape. In shock, Bruce and Trudy return home, collect their children and try to piece their lives back together but they are haunted by those few hours in the house on the hill and their once charmed lives begin to spiral out of control.

The opening chapters of After the Darkness are gripping. Lulled into complacency by the pleasure of a leisurely drive along The Great Ocean Road and the normality of browsing an art gallery on a warm, sunny day the terror Bruce and Trudy encounter is a sharp, shocking contrast. The first person point of view includes the reader in the journey, I know my own heart began to race as the the drug began to take effect and Trudy's confusion turned to desperate panic. Brown captures the psychological horror of being powerless, facing seemingly certain torture and death at the hands of a mad man. I breathed a sigh of relief at their escape but as the title suggests, it is what comes after that is the focus of this novel.

"I think a part of me knew even then we weren't leaving, not really. Some things you don't escape from."p50

As their bruises ripen and the immediate shock fades the horror does not recede as they hoped and the Harrisons' struggle with the facade of ordinary life. Reaching out to the police results in their claims being summarily dismissed. That leaves the Harrison's with few options and Brown allows us to witness the couple's slow disintegration from post traumatic stress. Both of them operate in a kind of fog, going through the motions but crippled by flashbacks and paranoia. They make poor decisions that exacerbate their feelings of loss of control. Trudy is led astray by a new tenant in one of their properties, Bruce thinks only of making someone pay. Normality blurs - truth and lies, right and wrong, everything tainted by frustrated fear and anger until Trudy and Bruce spiral into the darkness they so desperately tries to escape. This novel reveals it is not enough to just survive a terrible event, it must be overcome.

It should be noted that in an unusual move it is Bruce, not Trudy, who is the target of their sexually predatory captor, allowing Brown to explore a type of victimology rarely featured in fiction. It is Bruce's shame that drives his reaction to the incident, a desperate need to deny what had happened to him coupled with the eventual need to reassert his masculinity with aggression and control. It is his shame that ensures Trudy's silence and her guilt at escaping the worst of the abuse in the gallery.

Once begun, I couldn't put After The Darkness down, caught up in the story of the Harrison's inexorable slide towards destruction. The pacing is compelling, the creeping tension superb and the journey unpredictable. After the Darkness is a stunning psychological thriller that examines the stain on the soul true terror leaves behind. ( )

The problem I had with an earlier book of Honey Brown's was that whilst the thriller aspects of the book really worked, I was less convinced by the post-apocalyptic scenario and the happy ever after ending. AFTER THE DARKNESS solved those personal prejudices, and presented me with a thriller that worked on just about every level.

I just love thrillers that make the hair on the back of my neck stand up, that present a scenario that's unexpected, quietly disconcerting and extremely worrying. Particularly where the tension ramps up, the outcome's not immediately apparent, and the resolution ambiguous. AFTER THE DARKNESS takes a pretty normal married couple, successful in their business, happy in their family life and their love and relationship together, and in one seemingly innocent outing, rips that into little tiny itty bitty shreds. It then takes these two traumatised individuals, Bruce and Trudy Harrison, and makes everything a whole lot worse.

Whilst the ramp up is nicely paced, what really works in AFTER THE DARKNESS is the realness of the whole thing. Of course a holidaying couple would take a short bypass to an art gallery on the road back home. Of course they would fail to recognise the menace until it was too late (not everyone goes around expecting the worst after all!). Of course they would do whatever it took to save each other. Of course they would struggle to talk about the shocking situation they found themselves in afterwards. Of course they would react when the threat continues, and of course they would do what ever it takes when the threat gets too close to home.

All of which adds up to one of those much touted, and often not achieved, "unputdownable book". But AFTER THE DARKNESS truly was very difficult to put down. The writing is taut and subtle, the tension is built within the reader's head, as it builds in the characters lives. There are clever differences in the plot which give Brown options to explore the couple's individual and combined reactions and relationships giving the book a refreshingly different outlook. The characterisations aren't stereotypical - Bruce and Trudy may be a married couple, but their roles and reactions aren't limited by their gender and standard expectation. There's cross-over and ambiguity in their reactions, actions, and responsibilities. It's that realness thing again - they seem like very real people, in a very real scenario that's spiralling rapidly.

It's actually not that often that I find myself immersed in a book that I truly can't put down. Not only was AFTER THE DARKNESS one of the best thrillers of it's kind I've read in a long time, it gave me a chance to work long and hard on some good "can't sorry... reading" excuses.

http://www.austcrimefiction.org/review/after-darkness-honey-brown ( )