After a bankruptcy that led to an attempted suicide, sixty-year-old businessman Anders embarks on a weeks-long bicycle trip to escape the members of his tiny coastal California community and to contemplate how he manages to be still reeling from his mother’s own suicide more than forty years earlier when he was eighteen. Meanwhile, his friends and family back home grow anxious when a young woman, Marina, is murdered on the property Anders was forced to sell. Flashbacks to Anders’s youth and to the months leading up to his mental crisis dominate the narrative, delving into his backstory and that of the others in the town, including the murder victim, Marina, and an elderly man named Gunther whose past is connected to so many in the community.

Wayne Aronsen’s narrative in  UP THROUGH THE DARKNESS skips around between past and present, introducing characters who are loosely related to Anders and the other major players then bringing them into the fold in a manner that is somewhat contrived at times. Scenes that move outside Anders’s perspective seem to focus on petty drama (even when the circumstances are far from petty, involving financial corruption, family secrets, and murder) in comparison to Anders’s poignant psychological probing. By the end of the book, though, this is turned on its head, with an intense conspiracy revealed in the story’s striking climax. Even when all the pieces fall into place, however, the characters’ countless unknown fathers and complex family mysteries feel unrealistic in the small coastal community where not everyone knows each other despite the minimal population; Anders and Gunther had never formally met, for instance, despite living next door to each other for decades, until a few months before the inciting incident in the book.

Anders is a sympathetic, introspective character, weaving poetry into his thoughts as he evaluates his relationships with those around him. He yearns for and grasps at a balance between independence and connection, rejecting those who attempt to reach out to him with humble realism. His troubled past is reflected in his present actions and emotions despite his unwillingness to accept the reality of his complicated family history. Though he is sixty years old in the events of the book, this is a coming-of-age story more than anything, as he grapples with what it means to be a son, a lover, a friend, and a leader in the community. Aronsen’s lyrical prose evokes a calm, serene atmosphere, emphasized by the small-town setting and vivid, imagery-driven language. The California landscape streams by as Anders propels himself through the wild on his bike, the antique Asian-inspired décor in a travel-obsessed widows home is the picture of vibrancy, and an olive tree farm embedded in the rolling hills along the coast is the portentous setting of a mystery—utopian at first glance but certainly more than meets the eye.

With a gorgeous setting and and even more beautiful prose, Wayne Aronsen’s UP THROUGH THE DARKNESS is a literary novel about long-lost family and the lengths people will go to protect their legacy.

~Aimee Jodoin for IndieReader