Book Review: "All the Colours of the Dark" by Chris Whitaker

I am going to start with being perfectly honest with you: I only read this book because everyone I saw on Twitter was reading it as well. So, of course, I thought it must be something extremely special. It was more of a mixed bag if I'm going to be perfectly honest. By the time I had finished the book, I went back to why I had bought it in the first place and read again what people had written about it on social media, the fact that it had a 4.4 score of GoodReads and finally, what I had read about it on websites where I may buy the book. This is where I began to realise why I would come to use the term 'mixed bag'.

First of all, this story is a thriller following a serial killer murdering girls in a remote place in the USA. These girls keep disappearing until one day, a local hero arises from the flames: the one-eyed boy named Patch. The decade is the 70s and though serial killers were everywhere at this time, I think that the killer in this text kind of stands on his own as this psychotic evil that we never really gain that much access to as a person. The whole point is that he remains an elusive floating character. It was a good decision by the author, although the pacing of such things is something I will come on to later.

This story is then a coming-of-age novel. We have two characters who are the best of friends: there is a one-eyed boy named Patch and a young girl who lives with her grandmother named Saint. When Patch disappears, Saint is on the case looking for him and wondering where he could be. There are points in the novel where Patch is feared dead and parts where he may be feared to have moved on from the USA. Saint spends a large majority of her time contemplating what could have happened to her friend and then, when he finally turns up again, there are some questions he must answer for himself. This storyline made more sense than the serial killer one mainly because it was paced correctly.

I would say though that there is a good chunk of the middle of this book which dragged to the point of no return. When Saint goes to focus on the whole bank robbery situation (yes, it is another sub-plot), I feel like the book kind of takes its turn for the worst. It does not really move on and we get bogged down into sub-plots which struggle to come together and have meaning. On top of this, the writing style is overtly sentimental and often does not suit the subject matter of serial killings and bank robberies. Perhaps it suits the bildungsroman more, but not the mysterious and chilling plots that happen in the book. It was quite off-putting for a long time and I was surprised that I carried on with the book at some points.

Now, the pacing. This is a big one. The pacing for the mystery storylines involving the criminals was all completely wrong. There was no heightened pace at all, but the writer took the same approach to writing pace for these storylines as he did for writing the romantic ones in the novel. Honestly, it really threw me off and was not very pleasant to read. I like the fact that the writer left out the gory details and didn't make it all stupid and graphic, but I would have wished for some better pacing because there was absolutely no tension in those scenes. Especially the ones in which there is fire.

However, it is not all bad. The descriptive scenes in which we get to feel the bees buzzing and taste the honey, the parts where we get to smell the grass and oversee the farms - these are written absolutely beautifully because the pace and style is correct for them. The symbolism of bees in a hive returns later in the novel as well and I do have to say it was worked in quite cleverly.

All in all, I feel like this book was, as you can tell, a mixed bag. It was not perfect by any means, but there were parts that were incredibly readable and others which felt like they completely missed the mark.