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Darkly is Marisha Pessl’s latest offering and one I was very much looking forward to since her book Night Film is my favorite book ever.

“Darkly games are not evil. Yet they contain evil. They teem with murderers, captors, goblins, tormentors�� many of whom appear at first glance to be trustworthy or benign. The goal of the player, the pawn, is always to root out the evil, unbury it and bring it into the light, no matter how impossible the task or how chilling it is to see. The end goal, the win, is always truth, freedom, strength�� and even love.��

This is the author’s first new novel in nearly seven years, and her second young adult story. I was thoroughly interested by the premise, which reminded me a lot of the themes from Night Film. In that one we have the reclusive film director Cordova, an almost mythologized figure in itself, shrouded in mystery and darkness. Here in Darkly we have Louisiana Veda, the intriguing founder of the game making company, Darkly. Each game more elusive and difficult to find as the other, impossible not to associate it with the independent movies made by Cordova. So much of the novel reminded me of Night Film which both made me pleased and frustrated. If for one, I enjoyed it because it was allusive to my favorite book of all time, on another note it made me increasingly irked, since it was just rehashed from another one of her novels that executed it way much better

Ultimately my main complaint about Darkly is that it is underdeveloped in so many aspects, in part because of the genre the book sits at, being a young adult novel there are some cliches that are expected of this genre that simply do not serve this narrative at all because of they way these concepts were inserted in the story. The frankly pathetic aspect of Dia and Poe’s apparent romantic relationship has simply no logic reason to be in the story, the fact that Dia spends the entire narrative suspicious of the other characters, doubting their motives and intentions, to in the last pages of the novel, nearly at the epilogue, the story treats the whole group as one big found family—which by the way, would have been excellent if worked from the start—when there was absolutely no construction for that, and also no explanation as to why she ended up trusting them in the end. And I wanted to love it, because found families are my weakness through and through. The writing was completely inconsistent with the tone of the novel and the behaviour of characters who are supposed to be seventeen years old. There was a lot of challenging language, with words that I had to keep consulting the dictionary and it kept putting me off from the story and the characters world, because it simply did not match the tone of the story.

I think it was about halfway through that the book kind of lost me, especially the fact that every chapter ended on a major cliff-hanger or a dangerous situation for the main character, only for the chapter to end and cut to black and when the next one began the characters were discussing what happened after the events and safe. The fact that this artifice was used so many times was incredibly tiresome and predictable, it made me not fear for anything in the story because I knew that it would be okay as soon as the chapter ended.

I really disliked how the other characters besides Dia were so under-constructed, everyone was just so stereotypical and I can’t even say that they were onedimesional because it felt less than that, they felt like living archetypes just put there in order for there to be something called a “group��, and some of them I could barely differentiate from the others because of how little they even spoke or acted. I didn’t even knew what their names were much less their personalities.

I enjoyed the mystery a lot, Marisha Pessl can certainly write a good mystery, and I loved everything about the construction of Darkly, as a company, the creation process of the games, the mystery surrounding Louisiana Veda herself, the whole vibe and mood of the novel were immaculate even if it’s Night Film’s little sister, there were moments when it made me really nostalgic for the first time I read NF, almost ten years ago. And I do have to take my hat off for the Pessl in her construction of the games, it would be incredible if we could play the Darkly games as well! This book, same as Tomorrrow, Tomorrow, Tomorrow deserved a marketing campaign that released both the book and the games it features at the same time, it would be a fantastically immersive experience for the readers.

I think letting my reaction to this novel simmer down and cool a bit, it made me realize that I didn’t like this book nearly as much as I thought I did when I first finished reading it. What at the time felt like a four-star rating, is now clearly much more a three-star. There are so many things that bothered me, and most of them stem from the same underlying factor. I ended up having too many expectations for Darkly before going in, and it sadly did not live up to them. It wasn’t by no means an awful book, and I don’t regret reading it, however I cannot say that I loved it either. It sits in the very middle, and that might be the biggest disappointment of all.

Thanks to Penguin Random House for the ARC in exchange for my honest opinion!