Haunting concepts, slightly uneven delivery.
This reads like a study of thresholds: what we believe about light, and what we ignore when it dims. The recurring image of covered mirrors and shuttered rooms turns the title into a thesis, a reminder that terror blooms "when darkness swallows the familiar."
Under the fear beats a quiet argument about denial, shared responsibility, and who gets left outside when night arrives. The horror works because the metaphor never lets go, yet it never feels like a lecture.
Instead of lore dumps, the setting builds itself through small violations of physics: shadows pooling against the wind, clocks stuttering near the blackout, birds refusing a sky that looks wrong, and the understated rules of that wrongness quietly raise the stakes until even a porch light feels like a prayer.
The narrator's internal monologue thrums with anxious, believable loops, the kind that make you question every creak and glance. Dialogue arrives sparse and pointed, like people afraid the dark might overhear, and those hesitations become a character of their own.
What I loved most is how fear maps onto ordinary choices: locking a door twice, angling a mirror, avoiding the window after sunset. Without over-explaining, the book shows a mind trying to draw borders the night keeps erasing, and that ache made the horror feel painfully human.
The prose favors short, pulse-like beats that keep the air tight without resorting to cheap jumps. Chapters alternate a restrained close third and fragmented documents; that braid makes the ordinary unsettling.
If the middle sags, it's only because the silence is deliberate. The motifs of light, reflections, and shadows echo with purpose, and the closing cadence lands with eerie control.
A slow, moody crawl into dread that spikes hard when the sky goes wrong. The final image lingers like a bruise.
