All the Colors of the Dark - Chris Whitaker - ★★★.½

AUTHOR: Chris Whitaker

GENRE: Literary Fiction

PUBLICATION DATE: June 25, 2024

RATING: 3.5 stars.

In a Nutshell: A literary saga spanning multiple genres and decades. It's not just the story of a tragedy but also of what happens after a tragedy. Will work better if you know what to expect. It isn’t a traditional mystery-thriller, so better if read as a character-driven drama.

Plot Preview:

1975. Monta Clare, Missouri. Patch is a one-eyed teenager who considers himself a good pirate. His only friend is the whimsical thirteen-year-old Saint, who lives with her grandmother. In their small town where everyone knows everyone else, Patch and Saint think they have their future paths clear. All changes when a mysterious man attacks Misty, the only daughter of a wealthy family. Patch emerges as an unlikely hero in this situation, but the life trajectory of the people involved changes forever as a result.

Spanning many decades and genres, the story comes to us from the limited third-person perspectives of the key characters.

Imagine this. You are visiting a tourist place that you have heard some good feedback about. You hire a tourist guide who promises to take you to your destination, but instead of leading you there directly, the guide makes you roam around myriad other places, telling you detailed stories of each of them. Most of his tales are interesting, but after a point, you wonder why he is traversing a circuitous route when all you wanted to go to was the destination promised at the start. Finally, after a long and somewhat frustrating journey, you reach your destination, and it turns out to be everything you hoped for. But as much as the joy of discovery is, you can’t help having mixed feelings about the rest of the day: yes, you gained insight about many other spots, but you also feel a bit irked at the amount of time it took to visit what wasn’t even on the agenda. It’s not like you didn’t enjoy the unplanned circumambulatory route full of surprises, but you wish you had been better prepared for it beforehand.

That’s me with this book. I was prepared for a thriller, but I got a slow-paced literary fiction. While I can often recalibrate my reading sensor according to the writing approach, it failed this time.

Bookish Yays:

😍 The main characters: Saint & Patch. Well-sketched, complex, grey, human.

😍 Patch’s being one-eyed, and this trait being turned into an intricate part of his persona than making it a disability popping in at random intervals.

😍 An excellent start and an great ending.

😍 Evocative writing, with plenty of quotable quotes and lines to ponder upon.

😍 Superb use of the mountain setting of small-town Missouri, with great descriptions that don’t overshadow the plot.

😍 A unusual approach to a mystery, focussing on myriad obsessions of varied characters. This could also be called a love story sans romance.

😍 Enough of twists and turns to keep you going on. You will not be able to predict the direction of most of the plot.

😍 Though there are many crimes that occur in the book, the content never gets graphic. Love it when authors don’t let gore do the talking.

Bookish Mixed Bags:

😐 As this is tagged as a mystery-thriller, I went in hoping for a steady-paced, thrill-inducing, mystery. But while there is a mystery in the book, it is not the prime focus of the plot, which is quite character-oriented, and stresses more on the lives of the people affected by the crime than on the crime itself. This definitely would have worked better for me had I been mentally prepared for a literary drama than for a crime thriller.

😐 The middle chunk of the book drags. A LOT! Had I been a willing DNFer, I might have even quit on the book at this point. But thankfully I didn’t as the ending was worth the wait. Either the middle section should have been tightened or this should have been marked as a character-driven literary work so that readers would know what to expect. (Especially those of us who haven’t read this author before and went in blind.)

😐 There are many side plots detracting from the core mystery. While these are intricately layered and well written, the fact is that I wanted to see the mystery resolved than to know more about other irrelevant things.

Bookish Nays:

😕 The story spans decades. Though there are years marked at the start of a few chapters, it is confusing at times to remember how old the characters are at that point. Patch’s age isn’t clarified at all (as far as I can remember; hope I didn’t miss any reference), so I just assumed him to be the same age as Misty. There are pop culture references to help out, but these would work only if you know the approximate period to which the references belonged.

😕 This book has 261 short chapters, with some of the chapters being hardly a couple of pages long. I know there are readers who like short chapters, but this was too many for my liking.

😕 The pacing is quite erratic, going from rushed at the start, to almost zero in between, to fast again at the end. In a 580+ page book, I’d have appreciated a more consistent tempo.

My reading experience of this novel reminded me of how I felt on reading Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch - yet another magnum opus that begins with a mystery but takes ages to be resolved. In both cases, I liked the journey, but I was more relieved than exhilarated to reach the end.

This is my first book by this acclaimed author, so I shall be better prepared for a literary approach the next time I pick up his work.

Mine is a slight outlier review. Most other reviews of this book are gushy 5 stars, so perhaps it was only my erroneous expectations courtesy that dratted “thriller” tag that caused my experience to go awry. I still recommend this strongly, but to literary fiction lovers who enjoy the artistic nuances of storytelling and character development. If you want a fast-paced mystery-thriller, pick something else.

My thanks to Crown Publishing and NetGalley for the DRC of “All the Colors of the Dark”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.