Ghosts, Memories, and Taking Your Time

I was late getting to this book. But most horror fans I know had read it already and had nothing but glowing things to say, so I knew going in that it was going to be good. And it really was! Scary, tense, ever so slightly (read: really) enraging at times, The Dead and the Dark proved to be superb queer horror.

It also made me cry. A lot. I mean ugly crying, suddenly glad I live alone, thank the ghouls I’m not wearing mascara crying.

(What can I say, it’s been a rough couple of months years.)

In the weeks since I finished reading The Dead and the Dark, I’ve been thinking a lot about my reaction to it. I have always preferred my horror books to have plenty of heart. I like to feel that pathos and engage with that catharsis of connecting emotionally with a story, even if that emotion is frustration or rage. And sometimes in the past when I’ve been zipping through a book— whether because I feel pressed for time, or because I’m downing it in one sitting because it’s just that good— I end up skimming across the top of that cathartic experience rather than letting myself just soak it in.

With The Dead and the Dark, my schedule that week forced me to slow down, take my time, and I really think that my reading experience was richer for that. And thank goodness, because I would not have wanted to miss a moment of this book.

Set in the tiny town of Snakebite, Oregon, The Dead and the Dark is a queer YA horror novel that is as much about the shadow of prejudice that lurks behind the faded main streets of so many small towns as it is about ghosts. Hauntings both figurative and metaphorical. Logan Ortiz-Woodley lets herself be dragged to Snakebite by her fathers Brandon and Alejo, but only reluctantly because the last thing she wants is to get caught up in one of their ghost hunts. What she doesn’t realize until after they arrive is that both men are originally from Snakebite, and have nearly as many secrets as the town itself. Secrets that might have something to do with the teens that have started disappearing. Ashley Barton’s boyfriend was the first teen to disappear, and as tensions in the town mount, igniting old prejudices, and suspicion begins to fall on Logan’s fathers, the two girls join forces to find answers.

It probably sounds like a familiar plot, and in a way it is: murder mystery meets the supernatural by way of family secrets unearthed by teenage sleuths who then find themselves in Deadly Danger. But what makes The Dead and the Dark unforgettable is the way that Gould takes a familiar story type and enriches it with this wealth of humanity (good and bad) and emotion.

We’re all familiar by now with the idea of ghosts as symbolic, they’re rarely ever just the spiritual remains of the dead. They’re always imbued with some kind of meaning, whether in what created them, in how they present themselves, or how they’re finally banished. In The Dead and the Dark, Gould’s ghosts are literally memories, of the living as well as the dead. They’re moments of such pain or sorrow that they’re crystalized forever, repeating in a loop that few can see.

And look, I’m easy prey here. The idea of ghosts as memories always wrecks me. Especially once Gould began to reveal the particulars of Brandon and Alejo’s pasts in Snakebite. Because, you see, the mystery of the disappearing teens that drives much of the plot of the book is actually resolved about 95% of the way through, and the actual climax of the book ends up being about secrets and small towns, love, hate, grief, and forgiveness. And if I had been reading straight through, at the speed I used to read, I don’t know that the truth about the past— Brandon’s, Alejo’s, and Logan’s— would have had the chance to hit so hard that it left me in tears.

So in a way, even though I might have once been able to read three books in the time it took me to read The Dead and the Dark, I’m glad I slowed down. Because I wouldn’t have wanted to miss feeling all the things that Gould made me feel in that moment. Emotions that were as healing as they were painful.

Maybe that sounds like a line, and you can roll your eyes if it does. But if you haven’t read The Dead and the Dark yet, or if you have time in your own schedule to read it again, I highly recommend adding it to your Pride TBR. It’s gorgeously queer, genuinely creepy, and brutally honest about what it means to just try to exist in a world that sometimes feels overwhelmingly full of hate, and pain, and grief.