Darknesses: a review

Is it wise, really, to fall in love with “a mass-murdering sentient bat colony”? And supposing you did — how could you be sure that your emotions were real?

If you are like me, at some point in life you have questioned the reality of your own feelings of love. What, in the moment, feels like the perfect manifestation of romantic devotion can sometimes appear, in sober retrospect, to be merely a phenomenon produced by your desperation not to be alone, or by lustful infatuation gussied up, or by anxiety that nobody will come and take care of you, or by heedless yearning to be proven of humanly value. The problem is that these are emotional prevarications which, when we are in the swaddles of love, the mind hides from itself.

Lachelle Seville’s novel Darknesses (2022, tRaum Books) retells the tale of Dracula in 2010s New York City in a way that convinces me the author had such uncertainties in view. When authors write about love, they seem to do so from one of two vantages: The first is, you meet your soulmate, follow the steps, tick the boxes, overcome the hurdles, and there you go: you got your love. The second is less like a tidy tale and more like reality: it takes into account the ways the mind lies to itself, the ways emotion insulates reason. Darknesses is of this second variety.