This book rages like a beautiful tempest. An undaunted chronicle of a family shipwrecked by an indescribable loss, Daniel Magariel's Walk the Darkness Down is a brutal, exquisite, and ultimately unforgettable novel.
” —Hernan Diaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of TRUST
"Two years ago, Les and Marlene lost their daughter . . . This melancholy novel delicately charts their paths back to each other, and maybe forward." —The New York Times Book Review
"Tight prose and winsome romance make this a modern Hemingway—grit at sea thrust forth into the era of strict fishing regulations and Narcan. Marlene and Les are gorgeous characters. Readers will fall in love." —Booklist
“A bracing story of grieving, coping, and reaching for the terms of recovery.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Magariel's prose is as quietly lovely and evocative as his subjects are bleak . . . Stark and tragic, Walk the Darkness Down offers a harrowing view of individual and familial suffering—with empathy and, ultimately, with hope . . . this novel of loss, grief, and strained bonds investigates human connections and disconnections.” —Shelf Awareness
“Beautifully wrought.” —Lit Hub
“Moody . . . atmospheric, this psychological drama gets the job done.” —Publishers Weekly
“The book's briny geography lies between Florida and Cape May-aboard a scallop-fishing vessel with a near-psychotic crew, in the kitchen of Marlene, derailed by an old and guilty grief, into the thoughts and violent actions of Les, her bedeviled husband. We catch our breath at the impulsive decisions of Josie, a young prostitute whom Marlene has befriended. Magariel is our Virgil, guiding us through this inferno with sentences like burning flags. The characters' chained lives chafe against each other. We work through the difficulties of tenderness, the luxury of hurtful words, the jagged psychologies of male bonding, loneliness, misunderstanding and isolation. We struggle with the characters to reclaim vanished affections, to face self-knowledge, and, finally, to try to repair the fragile cracked-glass splinters of love that lie underfoot. We long for the characters to make the right choices. This is one for readers who appreciate fine writing and can take punches from the shoulder.” —Annie Proulx, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of BARKSKINS and THE SHIPPING NEWS
“Daniel Magariel has written an astonishing novel about a marriage burdened by a soul-blistering tragedy (among other things). Wide and deep as it is, you enter with joy and leave it with regret. The prose is elegant and unforgettable, and the plot keeps you turning pages. Sleeper hit of the season, I predict. Buy this book!” —Mary Karr, author of The Liars' Club and Tropic of Squalor
“Alternatively gritty and tender, Daniel Magariel's Walk the Darkness Down leads us through the long dark night of grief toward the possibility of morning. We read on hungrily, immersed and haunted, into the world Magariel has so sharply conjured.” —Chanelle Benz, author of THE GONE DEAD
“Daniel Magariel's novel–an extraordinary pair of chamber pieces, one nautical, one terrestrial–is courageous and transfixing.” —Joseph O'Neill, author of NETHERLAND
“Feral and tender . . . a gorgeously tight tale swelling with wisdom about the self-destructive longing for paternal approval and the devastating consequences of clinging to rotten models of masculinity.” —New York Times Book Review on ONE OF THE BOYS
“A knockout debut. A shimmering, heartbreaking portrait of children fiercely devoted to a damaged parent and of the intense sibling bond that helps them through.” —People on ONE OF THE BOYS
“Striking . . . A novel of short, blunt, often powerful sentences . . . Musical and painterly.” —Boston Globe on ONE OF THE BOYS
“One of the most striking debut novels of the year.” —Rolling Stone on ONE OF THE BOYS
“Brilliant, urgent, darkly funny, heartbreaking-a tour de force.” —George Saunders on ONE OF THE BOYS
2023-06-21
A troubled couple journeys through despair and compulsion as they struggle with loss.
After the accidental death of their young daughter two years ago, Les and Marlene’s marriage has foundered. Les seeks respite from his grief in drug use and long stints as a commercial fisherman in an unnamed region of the Northeastern U.S., while Marlene befriends sex workers in the hope of creating a therapeutic maternal role for herself. The two have effectively abandoned one another without formally separating, and the story charts their eventual confrontation with the trauma they have been unable to accept. A notable strength of the work is the engaging backdrop it provides of maritime culture in a declining town. There are consistently sharp and memorable descriptions of land and sea and of the ecological disruptions which form a counterpart to the human world (communities of horseshoe crabs, red-winged blackbirds, and American bullfrogs endure their own systemic challenges here). The author clearly knows this world well; the daily lives of those in the fishing trade, at work and at home, are rendered with a strong sense of authenticity. Several sections that document the routine dangers, professional tensions, and economic realities faced on a scallop boat are particularly gripping. Less successful are the rather stale scenes and occasionally implausible dialogue charting the psychological mechanics of Les and Marlene’s failing relationship or Marlene’s interactions with Josie, her ersatz daughter, and the pimp who eventually reclaims the girl. The novel is written in a style that oscillates, a little awkwardly, between brisk realism and a sometimes-strained poeticism: “He stares straight ahead, eyes glittering and indignant....Music floats pendulously through the apartment and the tired night sighs with a dry wheeze.” Nevertheless, beyond these distractions, the vision of a coastal region and its cultural milieu offered here is often poignant.
A bracing story of grieving, coping, and reaching for the terms of recovery.
