“In Darkness” by Nick Lake

The Printz winner for this year, “In Darkness” is a brilliant, disturbing and very dark tale (yes, pun intended).  It is, in fact, one of the darkest books I have ever read.  Unlike “My Friend Dahmer,” which hinted at horror, this book spells it out – all of it – in painful detail.  “Shorty” is a child of the Haitian ghetto who is deep into gang life.  At 14, he has killed many and has recently been shot.  Recovering from his injuries he finds himself in the rubble of a collapsed hospital during the earthquake of 2010.  Lost in the blackness, surrounded by crushed bodies and death, he recounts his brief life even as he struggles for sanity and survival, drinking in bodily fluids to sate his growing dehydration.  In the midst of this he travels back in time and bonds with Toussaint, a former slave facing his own nightmares as he tries to end slavery and unite a nation.  Nick Lake, a British national, clearly did his homework and the novel abounds with specifics on actual events but the telling is neither prosaic nor pedantic.  He does an outstanding job of getting into the heads of these two characters and making them real.  Lake also didn’t let history dictate the story, tweaking Toussaint’s life just enough to make the novel work.  At no point does this feel like a textbook accounting but rather the very real struggles of individuals against impossible circumstances.  These are characters you feel for and I felt ripped apart inside as these two men fought to move through their ugly, sad worlds.  It is a brutal beauty here.  Mr. Lake is a subtle writer and uses the two storylines in a parallel fashion to softly emphasize major points.  Chapter to chapter, each tale reflects something discovered by the “other half” of this duo.  Even the dialog is subtle, set off by dashes instead of quotes, blending back and forth between what is said and what is thought.  Lake has a lyric touch, even when using the foulest of language, as he describes scenes that many of us can hardly bring ourselves to imagine.  There are dead infants throughout, and shocking incidences (true) of UN forces treating the poorest of Haiti not unlike the Nazis did to the Jews.  First, they walled them off in a miserable section of Port-au-Prince, starving the people there from food (the residents sometimes resort to eating pies of baked mud),  job opportunities and medical services.  Then they went in with guns … ostensibly to kill the inevitable drug-lords that surfaced … and killed civilians in violent, late-night attacks that were indiscriminate in their targets.  That this did not make the news here in America is appalling.  That it was tolerated by the government of France, who was a major force in these actions, is even more so.  While very difficult to read, kudos should be given to this author for this powerful novel and for raising awareness of a people too often forgotten.  Shocking and painful, this isn’t so much a book you might want to read, but it is one you should.