Geoffrey Douglas’s LOVE IN A DARK PLACE is a moody, flashback-driven novel that pairs a decaying Atlantic City with the slow unraveling of an old journalist haunted by the past. At the center of it all is Sarah, a one-time escort tethered to mob secrets who’s found dead in a river decades later, and Harry, the man who loved her without ever fully understanding her.
The novel opens in 2017 with the discovery of Sarah’s body in the Shawsheen River, but the real story unfolds in flashbacks. Harry, now an aging English professor, thinks back on their ill-fated affair. Set against the backdrop of 1980s Atlantic City, when casinos were booming and mob violence was business as usual, the book thrives on atmosphere. Douglas’s Atlantic City is a place where a sort of manufactured glamour masks the otherwise pervasive urban rot.
It’s there where Harry first met Sarah, working under the alias “Dawn.” What starts as paid encounters soon takes on a strange emotional weight, as Harry finds himself drawn to Dawn’s quiet sadness: “You couldn’t miss it, but you couldn’t touch it either. It felt just out of reach to him.” Their connection was immediate, but even in their most intimate moments, Harry felt distant.
LOVE IN A DARK PLACE has a lot going for it, thanks in large part to Douglas’s impeccable plotwork and crisp writing. While the novel tends to adhere to genre conventions, Douglas paints an impressively vivid picture. At one point, he poignantly describes Harry entering “a stage of life that comes for some of us, when self-assessment has turned from serious to somber and the future, already narrower than anything we’d scripted or imagined, has ceased to beckon and begun instead to loom.”
There are so many points where the people and places feel familiar. However, even at its most predictable, the novel carries an air of lived authenticity. Yes, this is absolutely a work of fiction, but it’s not all that difficult to imagine Douglas’s characters as stand-ins for real people otherwise lost to history.
Ultimately, there’s more to LOVE IN A DARK PLACE than tropes and tragic love. Douglas explores loss and regret from practically every angle through Harry’s increasingly vivid memories. Even decades later, he tends to remember everything: “the poke in his ribs, her teasing voice, the small, delighted quiver it had caused in him at the time.” Douglas understands that some moments will simply refuse to fade, no matter how much time has passed—a sentiment that just about any reader will understand. In the end, this is less a story about solving a mystery than it is an attempt at learning to live with one.
Written by Geoffrey Douglas, LOVE IN A DARK PLACE is less a love story than a mournful, noir-tinged meditation exploring the cost of obsession, the pull of memory, and the impossibility of fully knowing the ones we love.
~ James Weiskittel for IndieReader