Books › Darkness Comes
Darkness Comes
First published 1990 · 499 pages
A relentless, claustrophobic descent into primal terror where the shadows themselves seem to have teeth.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like being trapped in a descending elevator while the lights flicker and something scratches at the doors. It is a quintessential slice of late-twentieth-century horror, trading slow-burn psychological chills for an immediate, adrenaline-spiking creature feature. The narrative moves at a breakneck, propulsive pace, dragging you through a gritty procedural that rapidly unravels into a claustrophobic nightmare. The prose is visceral and cinematic, designed to keep your heart rate elevated rather than to linger on poetic musings. It is dread-soaked and urgent, wrapping the reader in a suffocating atmosphere of primal fear. This is the perfect read for anyone who loves the nostalgic, unapologetic thrill of a mass-market paperback where survival is the only objective and the monsters are terrifyingly real.
- Mood
- dread-soaked
- claustrophobic
- nightmarish
- tense
- Tone
- urgent
- gritty
- suspenseful
- earnest
- Pace
- propulsive
- Themes
- survival against impossible odds · primal fear · supernatural intrusion · protecting the innocent
- The writing
- The prose is accessible and relentlessly forward-moving, leaning heavily into visceral, cinematic descriptions of terror.
- The arc
- The journey begins with an unsettling, gritty mystery that rapidly accelerates into sheer, breathless panic before culminating in a desperate fight for survival.
- Who it's for
- Readers who crave the nostalgic, adrenaline-fueled rush of late-twentieth-century mass-market creature features.
Content notes
- graphic violence
- body horror
- gore
- claustrophobia
- animal attacks
About the book
They found four corpses in four days. Each more hideously disfigured than the last, the bodies punctured with dozens of tiny wounds.At first they thought it was a savage psychopath. Then they thought it was a vicious gangland war. Then they thought packs of demonic rats were escaping through the ventilation system.
Then they saw the nightmare itself, in all its mottled, slimy horror, coming after them from every direction, and they realized that the Gates of Hell had been left open...
Published in the USA as 'Darkfall'.
Description from Open Library.
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