Where Dark Things Rise
Andrew K. Clark
Quill & Crow Publishing House
ISBN: 978-1958228982
Reviewed by Paul Knobloch for Readers Views (11/2025)
Andrew K. Clark’s When Dark Things Rise, a terrific new thriller and coming-of-age tale centered around the supernaturally gifted Mina, gets off to a walloping good start. One of the main characters, Gabe, is traveling down the road with his parents in an automobile when a massive wolf actually jumps through the windshield of the car, leaving him facing down the beast on the side of the road, next to the dead bodies of his parents. You see, supernatural horror in the teen world is always about a rude awakening, and much like Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm is a riff on Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, really, all coming-of-age stories are: they are a template for the horror of the spirit-breaking hazing that is adolescence, and this genre is perfect for the exploration of these trying times.
What’s more, this sequence also happens to establish the creepy and mysterious link between Gabe and the Wolf, which permeates the book. It is also one hell of a hook that kept me reading until the final page.
As I mentioned, the main character is the teenage Mina, from the wrong side of the tracks. She’s got a crush on Gabe, hoping, like any young and innocent American high schooler, that her new summer dress will impress on her first day back to school. As for her home life, her dad’s a boozer, and mom’s an unbridled, fundamentalist Jesus Freaker, addicted to listening to radio preachers on Sunday mornings. Suffice it to say that she wants more than life in a trailer park with these two stifling characters.
The creepiness continues at school when we hear that other students have spread a rumor about how Gabe, after the accident, sat holding his bloody mother’s hand like a scene from Carrie. The tribulations of Gabe, constantly being hunted by the wolf, are complicated by the exploits of Mina’s friend, Erin, who gets involved with one of the book’s key characters, the repugnant preacher, Ezra, who, with the help of some ghoul name “The Predicant,” runs a church that is little more than a front to lure in young women and force them to work as prostitutes. One even goes missing, and they soon attract the attention of the law.
Will Mina use her powers to fight the Red Wolf? Can she save her friend Erin from the clutches of the evil Ezra? And will using her powers mean that she’s forever made the choice not to live a normal life, but to exist on the edge of darkness, constantly negotiating with a dangerous supernatural world?
One can have plenty of fun reading this novel just for the plot, and yes, there is a face-off with the Red Wolf, and Mina will be there to fight for her friends. But the book does not come to a close with any facile resolution. This makes me suspect a second volume may be in the offing, and maybe even a series is coming, which would be very welcome, indeed.
Mina realizes what many of the other young protagonists in young adult fiction learn: life is made up of good and evil, and finding the courage to face one’s demons, and the light and darkness within our own selves, is precisely the work that makes us successful and realized human beings. Good coming-of-age novels always do this, and Where Dark Things Rise certainly does, adding some very nice fantasy and thrills along the way.