I Read Chris Whitaker’s ‘All the Colors of the Dark’.

Laughing in the face of my “fifty pages a day” ration, I blasted through this 600 page book in something like 5 days. I couldn’t put it down in my early morning sittings with it. When I was pried away from it and forced into my “real life”, the book would be spinning and spiraling in my mind. And when I would arrive home, the shoes would come off, and I’d dive right into the text for just 50 more pages. Just 100 more pages. This book captivated me in a way that few books have. And as much as I love some of the other books that I’ve read, this one straddled the line between literary beauty and liquid-fast language exquisitely. The brief and terse sentences spun economical and utilitarian prose in a way that made every word feel chosen and born for that exact sentence.

This book is brimming with Moments. Childhoods filled with imaginary adventures and obliterated by abject and evil reality. Adolescent love and the reasons we cannot keep it. Emotional gore and biological blood spilled. Running so far. Chasing so hard. Familial bonds without genetic ties. Birth mothers as vacancies. Wedded husbands as absentees. There is a lot of lives that we live through and within as we sidle up with Saint and Patch and Sam and Nix and Norma and Misty and so many of the Monta Clare natives. There’s even a character that we know more about, likely, than many of the others, and we spend just a fraction of our time with her.

While all of these Moments in this book are spun around the immense and strong character work that Whitaker has woven, this book doesn’t just expect us to hang on by the mere existence of these people, but instead illustrates a thrilling mystery that could work even if these individuals weren’t so compelling. Exploring the relationships between these characters feel like they respect the narratives of these characters as much as they do the personalities that exist within them. The police work that some of the characters engage in feels deep and fleshed out, feels important. Regardless of who’s doing it. Road trips feel long and enduring. The ground feels punched in and ridden well. Separate from all of the faces that make up the landscape of this story, I felt often that I was just as engaged in the Whats as I was in the Whos, and sometimes you have to make a choice between the two.

This is a ‘missing persons’ mystery that explores the idea that being found might not always consist of a departure of loss. Things don’t come back whole. Several times through this story, people are drawn into the hollow dark of abduction, and the realities of the quiet that exists on the other end of this are filled with a noise and a chaos that resonates through each page. Even when the hunt feels desperate and fruitless, there feels like there’s a density and a meat to The Work that feels vital and necessary. Untangling the web of one unknown strips the rippling questions of another. Light refracted through one broken vision reveals color upon its adjacent. And throughout this book, we find that there’s a desperate dejection, but a pendulum-sure drive that possesses the characters (with different intentions) to get to the bottom of the holes that they’ve found themselves in, physically, spiritually, emotionally.

I’ve talked about this book with a few people and it’s been hard to really land on particular ways in which this book has really spotlighted “the good parts”. It’s just the whole thing that really grips you as one big sweep reveals the next. We explore decades of these characters’ lives, of this town, of this mirage that may or may not have an end to it. It has feelings of many different works, of All the Lovely Bones, of Demon Copperhead, of True Detective: Season One, of Prisoners. But all of these other pieces sort of just touch on tone and palette, as they don’t really fully enshroud the entirety of what this work represents.

We get the complete lives of many of these characters. We have many questions raised and many of those questions answered. I found that each of the mysteries that came up, both criminal and interpersonal, were answered and fulfilled. I hardly found something brought to light that didn’t have a solution. There were a few things that occurred that felt just a bit too much of a coincidence in the end, but nothing that felt like it had any of the yuckiness of a Hallmark movie or that felt insincere. I just found that we played a lot in the Cormac McCarthy realm of ‘the darkness of the universe far outweighs the connectedness of human existence’ (or whatever) but in the end, a few loose strings are tied up by unlikely events.

I give this book my highest recommendation! I absolutely loved every bit of it. The number of pages does not indicate how long you will be mired in its text as it will completely rivet you to its story. The language is super fast, very digestible and the bite-sized chapter breaks will let you continue to devour the story in big bursts AND in each chapter, we reveal some new thing or question some new thing, so there is value in each of the many broken down elements. About halfway through this book, I had to suggest it to my wife because I needed to be able to talk about it with someone immediately. Phenomenal read! I want to shout out JJ who gifted the physical copy of this book to me after she had listened to the audiobook and wanted to share its story. Thank you!!