REVIEW | Darkling

 

Darkling by Brooklyn Ray
Urban fantasy, 126 pages, ebook
✭✭✭✭✭

Synopsis and cover from Goodreads:

Port Lewis, a coastal town perched on the Washington cliffs, is surrounded by dense woods, and is home to quaint coffee shops, a movie theater, a few bars, two churches, the local college, and witches, of course. 

Ryder is a witch with two secrets—one about his blood and the other about his heart. Keeping the secrets hasn’t been a problem, until a tarot reading with his best friend, Liam Montgomery, who happens to be one of his secrets, starts a chain of events that can’t be undone. 

Dark magic runs through Ryder’s veins. The cards have prophesized a magical catastrophe that could shake the foundation of Ryder’s life, and a vicious partnership with the one person he doesn’t want to risk. 

Magic and secrets both come at a cost, and Ryder must figure out what he’s willing to pay to become who he truly is.

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The real reason I’m not a booktuber is that if I had to sit down and film a video where I was actually physically talking about this book it would just be 20 minutes of me screaming “I’m gay” at the camera and I do that enough on twitter. I’m not usually huge on short stories (more on that in my forthcoming review of The Language of Thorns) but this really changed my perspective of them. Ray weaved the perfect amount of everything into this book, most notably the angst, which they easily could have overdone but didn’t.

CHARACTERS: 10/10
Now, y’all know I’m a sucker for good characters and Darkling has no shortage of good characters. The circle’s personality differences make for an interesting dynamic that’s twisted and engaging. Liam, the love interest, makes a fantastic balance to the protagonist, adding dimension to their relationship that made their chemistry that much more real. And Jordan is interesting enough I’d read an entire series from her viewpoint alone. But for me, Ryder was the shining star, which as the actual literal protagonist shouldn’t be surprising, but I have the tendency (read: bad habit) of falling for the side characters because protagonists often don’t hold the same allure to me. Ryder is different. I can’t think of the last time I heard about a trans main character that’s also queer in genre fiction and the way Ray handled Ryder’s transness felt realistic, a refreshing change from the rash of sob stories plastering fiction right now. Those stories are important and valid, but boy am I sick of reading about a queer person being sad because they’re queer, and there’s thankfully none of that here.

PLOT: 9/10
I have a lot of favourite parts of this book but the biggest one is just how well plotted it is. Not only is it tightly weaved like one of those ugly wicker chair on the back porch of every distant cousin, it also does a fantastic job of demonstrating the dynamics in play between not only the circle but also Ryder and his family, I’m really interested to see if the plot of future instalments will bring in more of the witch community as a whole, since we saw very little of them during the course of this novella. I also really have to commend Ray for their use of the sex scenes, instead of being an aside to the plot they contributed to it, and that’s not even mentioning that they were excellently written, richly detailed and delightfully realistic even with the magic elements weaved in.

ATMOSPHERE: 10/10
Port Lewis is set in Washington, and as someone that can see a mountain located inside Washington state from my bedroom window, I think I’m pretty qualified to tell you that the atmosphere of this book is spot fucking on for this little corner of the world. It was so easy for me to picture the town, the forest, the way the clouds would darken the sky, and sure maybe part of that comes from the fact that I grew up in a town sandwiched between of a primaeval forest and the Pacific Ocean, but Ray’s writing so vividly painted the scene that I’m sure someone living in the middle of a desert could do so as well.

PACING: 9/10
So. Pacing. Not the strongest I’ve ever read. The tension in this book is very good, which is a great thing for a short story since so many fall into the pit trap of character development over actual plot, but the pacing itself is a little more up in the air than I would have liked. I feel like good pacing could have also really enhanced the atmosphere—although the lack of it didn’t hinder it at all or anything—instead, it was left to fester as a separate entity. I still had to rate pacing fairly high because this is a short story, and there are only so many aspects you can dedicate page space to when you’re writing such a thing, and in honesty the only one I’ve ever read with genuinely great pacing is Sightwitch, which is in a very unique story to begin with.

ENJOYMENT: 10/10
I genuinely adored this book, in a way I wasn’t overly expecting from a short story. My only serious gripe is that it wasn’t longer but I’m sure I could read 600 pages of these characters and say it still wasn’t enough so I’m not sure how much merit to give that statement in the first place. Paranormal/urban fantasy was my first true genre love, and Darkling reminded me exactly why filled with magic but grounded in reality, I’m beyond excited to read the next instalment.

IF YOU LIKED THIS TRY:
— Bitten by Kelley Armstrong
— Dance Upon the Air by Nora Roberts
— Summer of Salt by Katrina Leno