The Hunter and His Quarry
“…it is no place, but a place of the head, of the mind, a place that is dreamed of to scare those foolish souls who in darkness look for dark things.”
Hunter of darkness or dark hunter, I wonder whether the one I earlier assumed has an affable soul guiding these stories, is not quite so cosy as I imagine, with degrees of deviousness or mischief, if harmlessly so? The blatantly admitted disguising of names of people and places, and making us believe the coincidence that the central event in this story happened to take place on a date crucial to the legend depicted, that is, the last day of April. Yet I can forgive anything, because this otherwise affable mover and shifter of what we read has an exquisite style of narration, bookishness and churchly equivalent manners, especially when here evocatively conjuring places such as this desolate, sparsely populated land on the Baltic shore, its churches and one particular island which, against strong advice, our would-be protagonist ‘Crusoe’ visits to check out an intriguing plaque he saw in a church. A Crusoe tempting a later close-hugging, hunting fate chasing across lands alongside the train he travels home in. A concept that will now haunt as well as hunt me, I guess. And that is true even though I have denied so far any factoring of that concept into vague memories from this story of babies and small children being sacrificed…
My full review of THE NIGHT COMES ON by Steve Duffy: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/06/30/the-night-comes-steve-duffy/
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