REVIEW: All the Colors of the Dark

A short review of All the Colors of the Dark by Chris Whitaker.

When my friend Bea introduced All the Colors of the Dark by Chris Whitaker as her pick for our monthly book club, I was initially excited. It got terrific reviews on Goodreads, and the plot, while dark, intrigued me. But after our book club discussion, where we went over almost everything inside the book, I was confirmed in my decision to only give it 3 stars. I wondered what happened? Why was my opinion so different from others? In this review I will try to go through all the reasons I took two stars off this book, and see if I can convince you too that I am justified in straying from the 5 star crowd.

The book is described on the back as a crime-thriller with an epic love story. I disagree entirely that there was any sort of love story, let alone epic, so here is my synopsis of this story. 13 year old Patch, a one-eyed misfit living in a small town in rural Missouri, suddenly and miraculously ends up saving the life of the richest girl in town from an abductor one day in the woods. The abductor who escaped turns out to be a serial killer who has been terrorizing towns all around them, focusing on teenage women. The story follows Patch, his friend Scout, and the rest of the town as they go through their entire lives haunted by this experience. 

This sounds like it would be an interesting, fast-paced crime thriller, right? Wrong. The total page count of the book is 656 pages. My first criticism is that it should have been 200+ pages shorter. The story spans the entire lives of the characters, but the interesting things happen really only at the beginning and the end of the story. The middle of the book dragged on akin to the middle of a 4 hour documentary on the building of the Hoover dam. (I’ve never actually seen a 4 hour documentary on the building of Hoover dam, but maybe there is a reason for this). I just stopped caring at some point. Every now and then something totally insane and out of plot would happen, as though Whitaker realized he was losing us and needed to keep us engaged. On top of this, while the story covered over 40 years of time, the change in times did not always make much sense. We would go for ages where the characters do absolutely nothing at all, and then suddenly we’d have skipped forward 6 years, completely missing sections of life that could be fascinating. (If my book club is reading this, you know which part I’m talking about). A suggestion by my book club is that it would have actually worked well as a short story or a novella: if the book had stopped at page 100, I would have loved it.

An argument here can be made on Whitaker’s side, that the lack of cutting and the lack of interest is really an issue with the editor. A good editor would have made suggestions of where to speed up and where to slow down for the reader’s sake. A good editor would be able to smooth out sections that were too jarring for the reader. My friend Ella made an interesting suggestion, that potentially because Whitaker is such a well-known and successful author, he was given free rein with this book. Most likely this was the case, as the more senior and experienced the author is, the more independent they like to be. This is still a failing on both Whitaker and the editor’s part, as there is a reason for an editor to be involved in publication, and an author should welcome it.

My biggest issue with the book may be a little bit more personal. While the book has so much darkness, what really happened to the girls, the victims of the serial killer, is really left for us to guess. It was like when during a movie the camera pans away before a death, or when you hear a gunshot offstage at the theatre to symbolize a killing. In some cases, I appreciate this, but in this case I felt that it did not make much sense. It skewed the book too much to the point where we lost Whitaker’s aim. Who was the reader supposed to care about? Is the book only about Patch and Saint and their stories? Or is the book about the horror that is inflicted on young women by men too often in our world? A book I think that balances this well is a book I have previously reviewed, Bright Young Women, which allows us to care about the main character, while also understanding that the point of the story was to focus on the girls who didn’t make it. By not allowing the reader to fully understand what happened to the victims, it left us with too much of a gap between them and us, stopping the book from achieving its full powerful potential.

Finally, I think the book did too much “tell not show” when it came to the moral. For books that want to make a statement, I think the best way is to guide the reader to their own conclusion, not tell them straight up. The character of Chief Nix moralized to the reader almost every time he showed up on the page. And while I loved his character and his growth, I wish he wasn’t used so much as a mouthpiece for the author. Sometimes an author needs to trust the reader more, that they will be able to look at their own lives without being told to.

Based on all of this so far, you are probably wondering why I gave it any stars at all, let alone three. The reason is this, the story was there, it had all of these incredibly interesting characters, and a fascinating and relevant storyline. But Whitaker never took his opportunity to delve deeply into either. The most interesting characters were given so little air time, and the most interesting part of the story came up only at the very end. I also learned, only after finishing the book, that it took Whitaker four years to complete it. This gives some explanation for the meandering storylines, the slow middle, the forgotten characters.

I think that as a writer Whitaker knows what he is doing, he has the ideas, he just needs to work with a better editor, and allow himself to write something shorter.

3 stars

Where to buy online: https://www.waterstones.com/book/all-the-colours-of-the-dark/chris-whitaker/9781398707658

Support your local bookshop and go in and buy it there if you can!