DARK SECRET starts with a bang. Actually, it’s a slap. The narrator, Nyssa Corbin, wakes up to her mom, Roxanne, hitting her hard enough to draw blood. It’s reader’s first look at a person who isn’t flaky or absent like other memoir moms–Mary Karr’s, say, or Jeannette Walls’s. Instead, she is more hell-on-wheels, a woman who, in addition to screaming and swearing, gets into multiple fistfights. Roxanne leaves Nyssa’s father and eventually marries Thomas Suleski, who has two daughters, Alex and Dawn. In 1989, Alex disappears, and Tom and Roxanne are convicted of her murder, thanks largely to Nyssa’s testimony of the escalating cruelty and abuse all three girls suffered.

Details are what make bad writing good and good writing great. Nyssa Corbin, however, is often short on them. For instance, in the chapter “The Belt,” she is living with her father, who she says “had not been a big part of my life for a couple of years.” When did this take place? How old was Corbin here? Why had her custodial parent changed? Later, she introduces her grandfather as “American Indian (some small tribe in Arizona).” The tribe itself may not be important to the story, but what is important is Corbin caring enough about this detail to find it out and tell us. What else, the reader wonders, does she consider trivial? This is not what writers want readers to focus on.

When Corbin does deliver on a detail, however, it hits with the force of a freight train. Writing of her father’s live-in girlfriend, Jay, Corbin says, “I know Jay was always cleaning the house (sometimes in the middle of the night, strangely), but it never seemed really clean to me.” She had already described Jay as someone who yelled, lied, manipulated, showed favoritism, and delighted in corporal punishment. Yet that aside about nocturnal cleaning is a loonier portrayal by far. “There seemed to be a permanent mustiness in the house,” Corbin goes on. “Maybe that was just the way that I felt when I was there.” This peek into a child’s mind is a hallmark of the best memoirs. Readers can do without the Roxanne and Tom trial documents, as well as the scenes of Corbin’s current life, all of which are a sort of bloodless coda to the main story, which rivals anything Dateline ever offered up.

Nyssa Rebecca Corbin’s DARK SECRET: The Complete Story is a grisly but uneven tale of abuse-turned-murder that will satisfy any and all true crime aficionados.

~Anthony Aycock for IndieReader