Erica Waters explores intriguing questions in her psychological thriller, The Restless Dark: What is the lure of unknowable darkness? What draws some of us to such topics as horror and true crime? To explore this idea, she creates a trio of young women: Lucy Wilson, Carolina Cassels, and Maggie Rey. All three characters attend a Killer Quest event set in Cloudkiss Canyon, an oppressive and terrifying locale in North Georgia where the fog can disorient a person and where legends swirl: Is this a place where people come to dispose of unwanted shame or “to toss ill-gotten goods, murder weapons, bodies, and anything else they cannot carry into the light” (14)?
Two years earlier, Lucy escaped the clutches of serial killer Joseph Kincaid when he was interrupted, fled, and eventually leapt over a rim in Cloudkiss Canyon to his death. However, his body was never discovered. Lured by a desire to find Kincaid’s bones and to walk away with her mind at peace, Lucy adopts a pseudonym and joins a true crime contest hosted by Human Beasties podcasters Sandra and Kevin. Before Kincaid, she knew what she wanted: to get into the best environmental program she could find and become an ecologist, to work in the field, restoring habitats and protecting endangered species. After being attacked by Kincaid, this smart, articulate young woman can’t even walk alone in the wilderness without being afraid.
Carolina is drawn to true crime as an escape from her own traumatic past. She wonders if she is like her father, a horrible monster in whom violence is just waiting to be unleashed. Because she has lost any memory of her boyfriend’s accident, she wonders if she actually killed him. As the fog disorients her and she loses her sense of reality, she has to remind herself not to let her father’s beliefs and behavior be her own. She vows that no matter what she may have done to Michael, she will not repeat it. After all, she tells herself: “There’s no such thing as generational curses, no evil carried in our DNA. . . . We are the choices we make, the actions we commit. We decide for ourselves whether we are good or bad” (47). Eventually, she comes to accept that her father is “simply a mean, hateful man who got religion, a man who looks at [her] and sees a reflection of his own shame (284), and a man who wants to cage and control her.
Maggie, on the other hand, is a sophomore at Duke University who is majoring in psychology and researching human behavior for a paper she hopes to publish. Confident, self-assured, and funny, Maggie has the need to charm and control others.
As the various contestants begin to grow suspicious and to act weird, all three characters feel like they have been dropped into a horror movie or into the plot of one of Stephen King’s books. When Maggie suspects that the fog might be getting to them, Lucy and Carolina thinks she’s joking. However, Maggie reminds them that a legend doesn’t have to be true to have power. “If people believe in something, it can be true for them. We create a lot more of our own reality than we realize” (101).
As the other contestants figure out who Lucy is and as they all grow competitive in their search for the missing bones, Lucy fears that she will get sent home without the closure she craves. Maggie, with whom Lucy begins to fall in love for her strength and understanding, insists that Lucy not give them the satisfaction of seeing her as a victim, of seeing her hide: “Lucy represents everything that’s wrong with the media they love, how exploitive it is, how it makes entertainment out of the worst thing that could ever happen to a person” (114).
Maggie also empowers Lucy to break free of the things that led her back to Cloudkiss Canyon, to prove that she’s more than Kinkaid’s last victim, more than a broken girl. However, what Maggie proposes might create more trauma, not free Lucy and enable her to tap into her power she searches to regain.
Waters weaves a mystery about many of the characters and their motives. With characters like Rufus, the satanic Santa, and Noah, the Kincaid worshipper, the reader wonders who will be the next to die. Along the way, we also learn some important lessons: If we laugh at the dark, it can’t hurt us as much. “It can’t get inside [us] and drag [is] down to hell” (157). Furthermore, we realize that although our trauma may make us more interesting, we have to defeat our monsters and survive our challenges. Finally, we accept that often things are not as they seem and that a criminal can lurk in almost any mind.
- Donna