Darkness, Take My Hand by Dennis Lehane
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"[He] was tied to a wall, his skin removed in strips, and then he was disemboweled while he was still alive."

Another dark crime novel by Dennis Lehane and another disappointment! Mr. Lehane can write masterful prose and even so-called "serious writers" could learn from him how to compose sentences that flow beautifully in paragraphs and how to evoke vivid images. Yet he devalues and destroys his own work by reducing the plot to the lowest possible denominator of tired clichés. Even worse, he attempts to capture the reader's attention through gratuitously portraying extreme violence, pain and suffering. Darkness, Take My Hand (1996) is a major contributor to the "pornography of torture" subgenre of the noir.

This is another installment in the Kenzie/Gennaro series. Diandra Warren, a psychiatrist and a professor at Bryce University, hires the detectives to stop the harassment she has recently been subject to. Her son is being followed and she received his picture in the mail. There are indications that the harassment may be connected with the Irish mafia in Boston. When Mr. Kenzie begins the investigation he himself is threatened by anonymous calls. What's worse, the woman who Kenzie is in love with and her daughter may be in danger as well.

The plot explodes in complications and the focus shifts to a gruesome murder of a young woman. The author goes full throttle into the horror of pain and torture. The orgy of violence continues throughout the entire plot. Even the funny passages are stained with the motif of pain:

"'[...] I tried pulling the tooth myself last night with some pliers and the sumbitch only come out like so far and then it wouldn't budge. Plus, them pliers got all slippery cause of all the blood [...]'"

Tired clichés of the genre abound like in the following passage:

"'Maybe he even wants to be caught, which means all these deaths are some sort of message, and he's going to keep killing until we figure out what it is.'"

Bubba Rogowski is the biggest cliché of all, almighty and invincible. How convenient for the author to have such a character to rely on! And how utterly boring to have that omnipotent persona in every novel!

The binge of violence continues and - even if it does not seem possible - intensifies in the denouement. The author ratchets the tension to the extreme yet all he achieves is that the prose reads way, way, way over the top. Histrionic, implausible dialogues towards the end of the plot seem to come straight from B-movies. I would not be so angry at the novel were it written by an author with a lesser talent. But Mr. Lehane has a great gift of prose, evidenced by beautiful, lyrical passages occasionally appearing in the novel. This could have been a very good book, yet I just felt distaste after I finished reading.

Two stars.

View all my reviews