Dark Sided

(Atheist in-jokes ahoy!)

Darkside is a children’s novel by Tom Becker. I bought a copy on that trip to England I keep bringing up because I was bored and it looked like it might be good. I’ll get the positive stuff out of the way first so I can get down to the bile and slander: the characters are interesting, the world is intruiging (if a bit over the top), ir’s not afraid to actually be dark as opposed ‘dark, but for children’ on occasion, and when I finished it I wanted to read the sequel. I suppose that’s a recommendation.

The book tells the story of Johnathon, a boy who skips school as often as possible while his father goes through periodic catatonic sessions, most of which land him in the local asylum. The whole set up is a bit like Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (fuck you, I’m not using the American name), except more realistic and without a pussy as a main character. Johnathon’s father, Alain, calls these little spells ‘darkenings’.

With the house to himself, Johnathon decides to break into his father’s mysterious study and find out what he’s been up to all of these years when he should have been looking after his delinquent of a son, and finds bugger all. The house gets broken into in the middle of his search by the mysterious trio who kidnapped some random kid in the prologue, and therein lies the first of the book’s sins. I don’t know why authors feel the need to introduce a character in a prologue, build him up for a little bit, and then have something horrible happen to him. (Or her, obviously). It’s annoying and fairly pointless, since these prologues usually don’t contain anything that isn’t revealed in the first few chapters anyway. In this case it actually creates something of a plot hole, since the orange-haired kidnapper woman (whose name I have forgotten) is moved to the point of tears at having to kidnap Prologue Boy but doesn’t seem to have nearly as much trouble with Johnathon. Maybe she just thinks he’s a prick or something.

Anyway, Johnathon eventually finds himself in the titular Darkside, where he seeks out a friend of his father, a werewolf detective named Carnegie. Before you start rolling your eyes (Yes, I know, ‘werewolf detective’), you should know that Carnegie is actually pretty cool. The inevitable ‘I’m turning into a wolf now and I’m going to eat you because you were too stupid to run when I told you to’ scene is a bit over the top and he fills the wise-old-mentor role by never telling Johnathon anything useful until it’s too late, but he’s a fun character overall. Darkside itself is a more sinister  version of London (which is saying a lot), inhabited by various evil humans and even more evil non-humans. Some of its denizens are genuinely unsettling, like the pickpocket with a third arm protruding out of his chest, while never being too frightening for children. Kudos to Mr. Becker for pulling that one off.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of little things that hampered my enjoyment of the book. Becker’s writing is generally pretty good, but there are odd little mistakes here and there that someone really should have picked up on, including typographical errors and sentences that end with one or two words seemingly cut off. The book is also too damn short, something that I’d like to be able to say about a lot of other, crappier books on the market. The story ends abruptly with loose threads all over the place, and while this is the first in a series, it could have done with being almost twice as long. The metropolitan police subplot, while necessary, is also really, really boring.

The book also features a vampiric banker who would probably come off as cliched if not for the fact that he’s called ‘Vendetta’. He’s also terrified of getting a blood-based disease, which, we’re told, is what finishes off most vampires. Surprisingly, he’s still alive at the end of the book.

Overall then, Darkside is an enjoyable romp hampered by poor editing and being too short for its own good.  If you’re wondering why this post sucks so much, it’s because I wrote it in about ten minutes flat and I wasn’t feeling all that enthusiastic.