Dutch horror author Thomas Olde Heuvelt gives readers a cast of characters who have made a Faustian bargain in his latest horror tale Darker Days. Heuvelt won the Hugo award in 2015 for a novella The Day the World Turned Upside Down. But his breakthrough novel was Hex, published in Dutch in 2013 and released as an English translation in 2016. Darker Days is pitched particularly at the American market, set in the small community of Lock Haven in Washington State – and in particular the residents of Bird Street whose houses back onto a particularly scary bit of forest.
When Darker Days opens, it is November 2022 and the residents of Bird Street are taking an old woman into the forest. They are there to help her take her own life but in the end she changes her mind. This is a problem for Bird Street as the families need a sacrifice once a year as part of a deal with a supernatural force they call The Accountant. The families of Brid Street will have good fortune and happiness for eleven months of the year, so long as someone dies in the forest in November. Many years before the start of the novel, they agreed that they would only sacrifice the willing, that it would be a form of assisted suicide. Until they are able to sacrifice someone, November, known as the ‘Darker Days’, brings them nothing but accidents and sorrow. This November things will get particularly out of control as the days tick away and no suitable candidate can be found.
The focus of Darker Days is the Lewis da Silva family – father Ralph, a district court judge, mother Luana, 15 year old daughter Kaila a champion diver with bipolar disorder, and 10 year old Django a jazz piano prodigy. During the Darker Days, despite their successes everything they have starts to unravel – Luana finds herself questioning her life, Ralph retreats into alcoholism, Kaila goes off her meds and Django finds himself attacking his piano.
As with any Faustian bargain it turns out that no one read the small print. Happiness, it turns out comes at a price that continually steepens. It is not hard to see the analogy that Heuvelt is building, particularly by setting this story in America. The idea that in the modern world much of our happiness and prosperity is often built on the back of someone else’s pain or denigration. The Bird Street residents call their devil The Accountant as a way of trying to make him less scary but instead they get to the essence of the deal – this is an accounting of sorts, a calculus of prosperity in which some lose so that others can win.
But besides all of the philosophising there are some genuinely terrifying moments in Darker Days, particularly when characters unwisely venture into the forest. Heuvelt has a knack for digging into the mundane (piles of sticks, mirrors) and making it scary. But there is a point where the narrative goes a little off the rails, an added ethical conundrum which perhaps was not necessary to drive a satisfyingly twisted resolution.
In Darker Days Heuvelt takes a well-used premise of a deal with a malevolent supernatural force (interestingly also used recently in a slightly different way in Joe Hill’s latest book King Sorrow) and delivers his own spin. Darker Days is a horror story with a philosophical heart that may force readers consider the price of their own privilege and success while also effectively scaring them.
Darker Days by Thomas Olde Heuvelt
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