Deep In the Darkness

by Michael Laimo
Leisure Books
$6.99

Michael Laimo's novel Atmosphere was a gutsy blend of horror and SF. With Deep In the Darkness, the author returns to his Golden Eyes tales and fashions a more traditional story of small-town horror. Though it begins in familiar territory, Laimo twists and turns it into unexpected areas that ultimately make it nicely creepy and downright terrifying in spots.

Dr. Michael Cayle moves his practice from Manhattan to a small town in New Hampshire. After all, the big city's dangerous, and just because the previous town doctor was apparently mauled to death by a pack of wild dogs, well, how typical can that be? Packed up with wife and little girl, Michael finds reason to fear something about his new practice almost from the beginning. Maybe it's the weird neighbor and his horribly scarred wife. Maybe it's the way the family dog reacts to the "lightning bugs" that seem to swarm the house at night. Maybe it's the way his wife becomes distant and hostile. Maybe it's the stone circle in the woods. . . .

Maybe. Before long, Michael is also becoming distant and hostile, but he's doing it to save his family. Forced into a sort of slavery in his own house, Michael slowly succumbs to the real power in the town—the subterranean Isolates—who might be described as modern Morlocks. As a doctor, his value is much greater than that of his family, which is why he must obey his new masters.

Once again blending a touch of SF with horror (look carefully and you might spot some H. G. Wells influence, as well as Lovecraft, and maybe a hint of Stephen King, too), Laimo manages a lot of mileage from what is arguably a very insular setting and limited cast of characters. His depiction of Cayle's downward spiraling relationship with his wife, and the unspoken enmity between them—and the reasons for it, which are different for each character—is grittily realistic. The flashes of violence, when they occur, shock all the more due to their concise brutality. Cayle's portrayal as almost Christ-like among the diseased, grotesque Isolates borders on sheer genius. And above all, Cayle's detached, almost robotic voiceover dictated into a recorder renders the narrative ominously foreboding. Lagging just a bit in the middle in terms of pace, the novel otherwise races to a satisfyingly terse conclusion. Taking its title from a song by ex-Marillion singer Fish, the book exhibits a hipness that belies its more or less familiar beginning and becomes ultimately an exercise in claustrophobic horror driven by the protagonist's burgeoning madness—madness, yes, but thoroughly justified and well-rendered by a seasoned authorial voice.