Rebirth in Darkness is a collection of stories that seem to centre around ideas.  They aren’t often stories in the conventional sense.  There’s event, sometimes, but the writing often seems more interested in playing with words—or in trying to be "Art", perhaps—than it is in telling a story.  It often uses fragmentary language and visuals, perhaps in an attempt to represent the broken mind of a character, perhaps in an attempt to evoke an emotional response in the reader.  Unfortunately, these "special effects" seldom work—and, more often than not, simply aren’t worth reading.  I think there probably is a storyteller under all of this experimentation—a storyteller who wants to get out—but, unfortunately, I think it’s going to take a lot of hard work for that to happen.

The prose itself is mostly okay, but I question a lot of the basic choices.  The author has a penchant for describing things in the passive voice ("a string of incoherent curses escaped her mouth", "Small, broken words escaped the thin lips of the elderly woman.")—which makes the text needlessly hard to read, and completely diffuses any tension that might have built in the scene.  Dialogue often seems little more than narration with quote marks, and I have yet to meet a solid character.  Point-of-view sometimes jumps from vantage point to vantage point at dizzying speeds—often within a single sentence.  Verb tense switches from present to past and back again—sometimes by accident (I suspect), at other times on purpose.  The narratives are almost invariably talky.  We are told what to think, and how to interpret what we are reading.  It’s pushy, and I didn’t enjoy the effect.

I have no doubt that the author of Rebirth in Darkness has put a lot of effort into his writing—and I don’t enjoy writing harsh reviews, I really don’t—but, in this case, I regret to say that there is little here that is worth reading. 

In one of her books on writing, Katherine Paterson said something to the effect of, "In writing, you can do anything the audience lets you get away with . . . but nobody’s ever gotten away with much." 

For sure, nobody can get away with this much . . . .

1 of 1 members found this review helpful.
Help us improve!  Register or log in to rate this review.