Cally Darker is a depressed true crime podcaster who’s feeling adrift in life. She’s living in Manchester with Dereck, her office worker boyfriend who doesn’t get Cally’s mental illness or her podcast, instead pushing her to get a “real job.” When Cally gets an email tipping her off about a decades-old family homicide, it spurs her to dump Dereck, leave Manchester, and flee to the countryside to stay at her father and step-mom’s house (they are conveniently away on vacation). Their little village is also close to the scene of the crime, allowing Cally to investigate the mystery firsthand.
The thing is, the crime isn’t a mystery in the traditional sense: Everyone knows what happened. From the back cover:
In 1983, experimental artist Tony Mathias began work on a new installation – it was to be a collage of visuals and sounds collected at an abandoned RAF base called Warden Fell. Various stories and rumours swirled around the place but Tony was interested only in the echoes of history. But soon after visiting the site to tape-record the sounds there, he returned to the caravan where he was staying with his family and killed his wife, his two children and then himself.
There is no ambiguity about who pulled the trigger: The book starts off with a transcript of an emotionally distraught neighbour recounting how he witnessed Tony shoot his own son and daughter. Everyone agrees Tony did it. But why would a mild-mannered artist known for being a caring husband and father do such a thing?
The marketing and first half of the book are very deliberate about keeping Tony’s motives secret, and rightly so. The first quarter of the book is a slow burn, with Cally taking a boots-on-the-ground approach to the mystery. She interviews Tony’s sister, and his agent, and the woman who was the caravan park’s landlady back in the eighties. Everyone is eager to aid Cally and be interviewed for her true crime podcast. Don’t expect any ruminations on the ethics of true crime as an entertainment genre—Cally’s podcast mainly exists as a framework for the story rather than being an active part of the story itself.
Indeed, this early part of the novel almost feels leisurely, like an Agatha Christie novel, though not one of her tightly plotted estate-set murder mysteries but one of her darker, more rambling yarns like By the Pricking of My Thumbs (1968). Some of the early interviews can even be a bit repetitive as far as the content that gets revealed: lots of “Tony was such a gentle soul, no one knows how he could do this” and so on. But, despite that, these sections are still a fun read because of how vivid the characters are (I’m a sucker for regional UK accents, and the author doesn’t shy away from them). There is eventually forward movement in the plot, when one of the interviewees gives Cally Tony’s old tapes. The tapes contain two types of recordings: Tony’s audio diaries and recordings he made when he visited Warden Fell.
The tagline for the book is “DON’T PRESS PLAY.” It’s an admirable sign of restraint that it isn’t until roughly halfway through the book that Cally does.
Almost immediately the tapes have evidence of the paranormal on them, something a shaken Tony notes in his audio diaries (amusingly, early on Tony’s biggest worry regarding this revelation is that it means he’ll have to scrap his installation idea). Cally gives the tapes to her pal Griff to digitize while she digs deeper into Warden Fell’s history (poor Griff is introduced with so many death flags he may as well be spelling out “I’M DOOMED” in semaphore). Cally also starts a romance with Ellen, a local copper. But as the days tick by and she listens to more of the recordings, Cally’s nights become full of otherworldly nightmares. It becomes clear that whatever happened to Tony is now happening to her.
At the halfway point the novel changes gears and goes from being a slow-burn creepy mystery to an unchained horror novel, featuring scares both bodily and cosmic in nature. Some of the descriptions of what Cally experiences are so vivid and awful they actually made me shudder. The turn the book takes is all the more thrilling for how out of left field it is, which is why I’m trying to be as vague as possible here to protect the premise. It’s not that where the book goes is wildly innovative or original, but the initial mystery is so tantalizing that coming up with your own theories is half the fun. It’s also a rare case where the story doesn’t deflate once all is revealed.
But even when the book gets into gonzo mode, there’s still long stretches of exposition. The shift from mystery to horror is triggered by a Skype call Cally has with a character we’ve never met and will never see again: He just shows up, drops some reality-shattering news on Cally, and then dips. Later on, even as the tension and the stakes keep rising, we still spend something like three chapters in a brand-new character’s living room as he shares his backstory.
As aggravating as this can be, even at its slowest the book is still a wild ride. A lot of modern horror that deals with curses often engages in fourth-wall breaking, a moment in which the characters or narrators say directly, “And now you, dear reader, are also cursed!” (See for example, About a Place in the Kinki Region [2025], a recently translated Japanese horror novel that I liked even if it used this hokey trope.) The Sound of the Dark is better than that. Here the horror is so well done that it can make the reader wonder if they have been cursed—whether being exposed even secondhand to the tapes has inflicted on them the same contagion with which the characters are plagued. After the halfway mark The Sound of the Dark stops being a subtle book, but this it correctly keeps low-key: The suggestion that you’re cursed is scarier than being told outright that you are.
The final act sees Cally and her allies and enemies going to Warden Fell to battle for the fate of the world—will otherworldly horrors be unleashed or will the site be cleansed? It’s a very Lovecraftian climax, but through a modern lens, less like H. P’s At the Mountains of Madness (1936) and more John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness (1994). It’s a fun climax, and nicely brings Cally’s arc full circle, her battles with her mental health mirroring her battle with the evil lurking at Warden Fell. Of course, she gains the knowledge of how to defeat the evil from a long convo she has in a dream with an ancient shaman—even when Cally’s asleep we’re not safe from exposition dumps. The fact that so many scenes are long stretches of Cally interviewing people, and that the source of the horror comes from a set of audio tapes, does make me wonder if this would have worked as a fictional podcast. But, while it might have made for a fun listen, The Sound of the Dark is still, in book form, a very fun read. If you’re willing to take a leap of faith, I’d highly recommend it.