⚡️ I was provided an audio-ARC by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review (Out 8/3)
This post includes affiliate links to purchase this book
If you know me, then you’ll know that I love audiobooks, so I jumped at the chance to listen to an advance copy of The Dead and The Dark because it was narrated by one of my favorite narrators, Soneela Nankani. Her narrations are always fantastic, so I assumed that this book would at least be okay, even if the premise wasn’t super appealing to me.
Unfortunately, I was wrong— this book was not it for me.
From the predictability of the mystery to the just straight up bad writing, I really had to force myself to just finish listening to this book as quickly as possible. It reads like a Ghost Adventures fanfiction (which I am sure preteen Em would have loved but adult Em just felt weird reading) with a hastily planned murder mystery overlaid on top of it.
This book defies logic, but not in a good way, and I was just not a fan.
The Dead and the Dark
by Courtney Gould
🌟: 2 / 5
📚: Snakebite, Oregon is a town where nothing really happens, and its residents like it being that way. But when teenagers start going missing and unexplainable weather starts hitting the town out of nowhere, Logan and her family of reality TV ghost hunters are forced to try to solve the mystery or become the town’s scapegoats.
💭: In short, this book is very forgettable. A week after finishing it, I couldn’t remember much beyond the basic premise and that Soneela Nankani was the narrator (which is why I picked it up in the first place).
The entire premise of this book doesn’t make much sense to me and the writing that supports it is flimsy at best. When Logan goes to visit Snakebite as part of a location scouting trip for her family’s TV show, she’s surprised to learn that 1) her dads are from the town that they’re visiting, 2) there are only around six people around her age living in town, 3) one of the few teenagers in town is missing, and 4) her strained relationship with one of her dads is somehow worse than it’s even been.
What makes less sense in this supernatural mystery is how clumsily certain elements are introduced. At one point, a character more or less announces that ghosts are real and they can see them. Instead of clues being found or characters coming to conclusions about things, much of the developments made to the mystery of the book come when a character decides to spill everything that they know, all at once.
With the exception of the main two characters (who have a total of 3 personality traits between them), every single person in this story is so flat and motivated purely by a raging homophobia that gets so tiring any time that they appear on the page (this is not a joke, they all completely stop doing anything, anytime a queer character appears, and they more or less robitically start trying to get said queer character to leave wherever they both are).
Usually in fiction, it’s totally possible to suspend disbelief and just let the story happen, but there were just too many times when I paused because that’s not how anything actually works? Sure, in a mystery, it can make sense for certain characters to be suspected as red herrings and removed from the storyline to prove that it wasn’t them, but the choices made about which characters to take out and what they were doing in the time they were gone just absolutely baffled me (like you straight up cannot be held in a small town’s holding cell for 2 months on just suspicion of murder without even being given an opportunity to contact a lawyer or speak to your family, it just doesn’t work like that!).
I found myself questioning on more than once occasion if this book was edited. It’s not only that the story wasn’t great, but the writing was just not good. There were so many occasions where the same word was used multiple times in the same sentence when it could have been easily swapped with a pronoun or synonym. Conversations between characters felt awkward, no matter the situation or topic (A personal favorite, when a character mentions that they’re a lesbian: “I think you’re really brave.” “Cool.”). The plot was mostly extremely predictable or completely “wait where did that come from out of nowhere.”
I don’t think I would recommend this book to anyone, unless your entire personality is watching ghost hunting shows. If you’re someone who can handle major secondhand embarrassment from awkward conversations, more power to you here. It’s oddly paced and sometimes very clumsily written, and I would not recommend it.