Draw the Dark (Ilsa J. Bick)
Shelved as a Young adult novel, I feel it is incorrectly categorized, instead it should just be standard dark fantasy. The only aspects of this that make it YA is the 17 year old protagonist and the heavy handed coming-of-age vein, other wise it is “King/Koontz-lite”.
Winter, Wisconsin. Murder. Nazis. Dead Bodies. Ghostly visions. Fatal fires. A boy who can draw people’s nightmares. All of these topics are discussed on the cover liner notes. What is not discussed is how well put together it is. It was surprisingly enjoyable from a number of perspectives.
Detailing the events around social outcast Christian Cage. Dark opens with Christian, being investigated for graffiti on a local building, red spray paint with swastikas and eyes. Christian does not remember vandalizing anything. This isn’t the first time that Cage has been in trouble with the law. The suicide of a school teacher brought him into the limelight when much younger.
Cage is an obsessive artist, falling into a near hypnotic groove, pulling visions into his art. Christian’s shadowy and often cynical work leads him to investigate a mystery that has been buried in his town since WW2.
In ‘Draw the Dark’, Ilsa Bick cobbles together a solid story. Not to be viewed as a negative point, people with half a care about WW2 era history will have key points figured out very fast, main plot points are not as “little-known” as the marketing blurbs will insinuate. As such, some of the plot twists are more like a cinnamon-y churro and less like a tangy knotted pretzel (mmm. soo hungry now). It is really all about the character progression and the deeper details of individuals lives, personal interactions, forgotten history, unheard conversations, and the desire to bury the past. It is the malleable characters and the incredibly solid framework of the tale that make the book.
Readers be warned that there is no evidence that this is the first book in a series. There are a large number of loose ends at the end, things you will wish were explained are left unresolved. It is not detrimental to the story, just something that might frustrate some.
- Hardcover: 344 pages
- Publisher: Carolrhoda Books (2010)
- ISBN-10: 076135686X
- ISBN-13: 978-076135686
Authors Website: www.ilsajbick.com- Ilsa J Bick is a Forensic and Child Psychologist. She is also surprisingly geeky. Besides short stories and Draw the Dark, she has written a large number of Star Trek, BattleTech, and MechWarrior genre novels.
- She is described as a “Surgeon Wannabe”, to which I can only speculate.
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