A Trick of the Dark

This is a story of shadows: illusions; concealment; dysfunction; despair. It was Jung who identified the shadow self, hypothesising that ‘everyone carries a shadow and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is’. A Trick of the Dark explores this separation of self from shadow and the devastating consequences of such a rift.

Marooned in France, in her family’s chaotic, unfinished holiday home, Annis endures the intolerable knowledge that her brilliant, talented brother Zach, expelled from his school for drug abuse, is drifting away into a dangerous world of his own.

His escape to the ruined building next to their home precipitates his metamorphisis. When Annis follows him she witnesses an accident in which Zach is killed – yet as she runs for help he appears in front of her without a mark, apparently fully recovered. While she is investigating the ruins for an answer to this startling conundrum, she experiences an inexplicable phenomenon: ‘The world wavered and went dim… everything was draped in a kind of veil, sparkling, but dark, like black gauze.’ She sees a fleeting shadow and the trail of death which follows it – dead plants, dying trees and withered grass.

This lethal darkness is Zach’s shadow from which he has separated, leaving him beyond harm and anaesthetised from empathic emotions, in a state of all-pervading bliss. A reversal of the rift will result in the loss of immortality and the death which Annis witnessed in the ruins. However, as Zach becomes increasingly consumed by this ecstatic state he transforms slowly into an insubstantial, almost transparent being, glowing with the force which is absorbing him. His physical isolation is complete when his touch generates a dehabilitatingly painful static shock.

Annis, gripped by love for her brother, takes the drastic step of separating from her own shadow in order that it might pursue and locate Zach’s so that he can destroy it and so liberate himself. She, too, is seduced by the subsequent release from negative emotions and almost loses her shadow – and her sanity – in the process. Zach, disgusted at the excesses of his life, unable to come to terms with his narcissistic and destructive personality, eventually not only accepts but welcomes his shadow back and dies in Annis’s arms in a scene which should reek of sentimentality but whose quiet power keeps it movingly focused in reality.

The strength of this book is its multi-layered storytelling, which allows readers to sift through the clues and dilemmas synonymously with the protagonists: the dual narrative makes this doubly effective. Mystery, metaphysical thriller, this is for able readers who are willing to embark on a thought-provoking and intelligent journey.