The first thing you need to know about When darkness loves us is that it comprises of two short stories. The second thing you need to know about it is that these are not happy stories.
The first story (from which the book takes its title) is about Sally Ann Hixson. Sally Ann is (only) sixteen and recently married (yep – the book was written back in 1985, but…still). Her husband works at Sally Ann’s parents’ farm trying to save enough money so that they can build their own house. One day, Sally Ann is wandering around the farm grounds when she sees some stairs descending into the ground. Naturally, she walks down them and into a tunnel that seems to go on forever. Her husband, meanwhile, has noticed that the doors to the stairs have been left open and shuts them, accidentally trapping Sally Ann underground.
What follows is the account of her life in the tunnels, surviving, even making a life for herself there. But then, hope enters the picture, and she tries to go outside…
The second story (“Beauty is…”) is about Martha, who is a middle-aged woman with special needs and a face deformity. Martha has been living alone in a farm since her parents died. The people in the nearby community visit her and look after her as much as they can. Hope, again, enters the picture, and we see Martha change. But not everyone in town has good intentions…
I didn’t think When darkness loves us was written in a particularly beautiful or poetic way, yet it touched me profoundly. It is classed as a horror book but the terror comes from knowing that the situations described in it could very well happen in reality. People are capable of doing terrible things. People do terrible things. The scariest thing about it was having to give up hope that there was any chance of a happy ending. That’s not to say that no scary things happened. There was an underlying sense of foreboding, of something being very wrong indeed. Especially in the first story, which also describes a very unnerving, claustrophobia-inducing environment, dread is always just a turn of the page away.
When darkness loves us is one of the Paperbacks from Hell, a collection of books curated by none other than Grady Hendrix. I read The Elementals a while ago based on Hendrix’ suggestion, and now this, and I loved both books (and Hendrix’). It made me want to read all of them.