![in darkness nick lake in darkness nick lake](https://media.bloomsbury.com/rep/bj/9781408819944.jpg)
Nick Lake has done something extraordinary with In Darkness. Even now when I look through the text it doesn't feel like my book." That was what the experience of writing this book felt like: it felt like Shorty and Toussaint wrote it through me. In, worshippers can be 'mounted' by the spirits, the lwa, and possessed. On several occasions I looked up from my laptop, having written thousands of words, with absolutely no recollection of what I had just written. "Actually the whole writing period was a very strange experience," says Nick Lake on his website, "and one that I still don't quite understand. His respectful incorporation of the vodou culture woven together with blinding, brutal truths (machete fights, babies in garbage cans, bloodshed on the battlefield) creates a heart-wrenching glimpse of both the history and the present-day realities for the people of Haiti. Nick Lake does a stunning job using sparse, stark prose to paint realistic and poetic pictures of both time periods. Interwoven with Shorty's confessional is the third person account of Toussaint l'Ouverture, the revolutionary leader who led a slave rebellion and made Haiti a republic (see ' Beyond the Book').īoth threads of In Darkness - Shorty in 2010 Haiti and Toussaint in 18th century Haiti - are rich in detail and intensity. It is from this place of not knowing whether he will live or die that he tells the story of his fifteen years living in the slums of Haiti: the choices he made for survival, his search for his twin sister, and his sense of the social and political landscape of this complicated country. Shorty is in utter and complete darkness. The story begins - and continues - there. He has been caught in the 2010 earthquake that rocked Haiti. In Darkness, by Nick Lake, begins with Shorty, trapped beneath the rubble of the hospital where he was being treated for a gunshot wound. Vermont may seem dark to me, but I haven't been buried beneath the steel and plaster and wood of a hospital that has fallen in an earthquake. Of hope.īut of course darkness - like all things - is relative.
![in darkness nick lake in darkness nick lake](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51o-TpwBFtS.jpg)
In its vast and seemingly endless sameness - no visible contours, no rises and falls, no shades of color - it is tough to find a sense of possibility. It is pitch black outside, it is tough to distinguish between reality and dream, and every cell in my body wants to fold back in on itself and sleep. My alarm wakes me up at 5:50 in the morning, and my 4-year-old daughter (who has often managed, at some point, to crawl into bed with me) opens her eyes and says, "But it's still night." And I can't help but agree with her. A story about the cruelties of man and nature and the struggle for Haiti's survival, ages 14+