Hi everyone and welcome to my little blog where #Fahrenbruary is still in full swing! I know by now you’ll know what that entails, supposing you have not been hiding under a rock these last couple of days, but if you’re not quite sure, please check out my first #Fahrenbruary contribution i.e. a review of Red Hands by Ariana D. Den Bleyker here.
When Henry’s wife is murdered he’s forced to disappear. Nobody would believe he didn’t kill her. His sister, the only witness, won’t testify. His brother-in-law, the detective, doesn’t trust him. His mistress, the investigating pathologist, won’t help him.
They all have their own secrets to protect.
And after all, Henry killed so many others before.
Dark Water is a pitch black tale of suicide, torture, murder and revenge as an artist returns to produce his greatest work out of those closest to him.
💛💛💛💛
So this is the second novella by Ariana that I’ve read (albeit in reverse chronological order but they’re standalones, so that doesn’t matter). And this is second time I finish a novella by Ariana thinking: what the HELL have I just read?! Only a handful of characters, all of them completely bonkers, in a story where the shit hits the fan so hard, said fan explodes in your face, because said shit is bananas! BANANAS I tell ya! All sorts of hurting and maiming and carving words into skin, and poking needles into eyes, I didn’t even need Fahrenheit Press to tell me it’s noir, I figured that one out all by myself thank you very much!
So what we have here is another decidedly nightmarish read. You know that feeling when you’ve had a very eventful day, you might be a bit shaken by something that happened or something someone said or did during the day, and when you finally get to sleep, you sleep very fitfully, your mind trying to process and make sense of the stuff that happened, you’re stumbling from one dream into another, waking up for seconds in between, and when the alarm goes off in the morning you’re feeling dead tired and entirely combobulated. That feeling? That is exactly how I felt when reading Dark Water!
In other words, this is a book you must not try to make sense of. Go in, immerse yourself, let the tide of strange, poetic sentences draw you into in the deepest darkest crevices of the human mind, let the madness wash over you and relearn how to breathe when you’ve turned the final page and the dark water ebbs away.
If you think you’re up to that, then I will happily recommend you pick up this novella and jump in at the deep end!