Welcome to the Tortuga Library Podcast from the Tortuga Society. This week we review The Earthen Dark by Brad Kelly.
“We woke up one day in the woods.”
“Who?”
“People. Us. Guys just like us. We were animals rutting in the swamp. And then we split the atom, built cathedrals, went to the moon.”
“Created financial instruments,” Armando said, “and supermarkets.”
“Everything. I wanted to understand how we could have possibly managed that.”
“And did you?”
“I don’t know. I think I would have just sat down and died.”
Jim Murray is an anthropology professor at some minor league university in Detroit, and he has been canceled, resigning from his teaching position after a social media witch hunt. He’s a young father with a five-year-old daughter, and suddenly he’s working on a sewer repair crew.
There he is, underground, with these working class guys. They find a fissure where all the pipes come together, and they crawl through it, climb up out of the manhole, and Detroit is deserted. There’s nobody there.
The style of the writing reminded us of Cormac McCarthy. It’s sensory and serious, with concrete imagery of the world around the character, and densely written.
In the bathroom, he put on deodorant and shaved clean and let the faucet cool his fingertips before pressing them to his eyelids. He staged spit mostly air into his cupped hands and showed his palms to the sky like the Elgoni were said to do. The earth outside the window was so dark, it might not yet exist.
Broadly, it’s a meditation on manhood. Horror, but there’s not much splatter. Lovecraftian, but Kelly has a far defter touch than Lovecraft did. We don’t have dark hints for fifty pages and then the money shot of the monster. Instead, we have dark mutterings for a good three or four chapters, until things go extremely sideways. If you are a father, this book is going to mess with you. In a good way, but there are scenes that are just absolutely wrenching.
Everybody says men don’t read anymore. Well, yes, they do, but mainstream publishing doesn’t publish anything for them. Manly, independent fiction, mostly on Substack, seems to be the theme for this podcast, and The Earthen Dark is a very fine example of that.
If you’re not out trick-or-treating, pick up this book and sit home on Halloween and plow through it. And then you won’t be able to sleep.
Mentioned in this episode: Cormac McCarthy, The Road, H. P. Lovecraft, and the Futurist Letters review of The Earthen Dark by Stephen Pimentel.
Join us next time for American Paladin by Larry Correia.
