Things We Do in the Dark

For the first 10 chapters, the novel hooks the reader in the manner of a conventional “whodunit”—the reader is given a brutal murder of a celebrity husband and a stunning trophy wife, who stands to inherit millions, actually holding the murder weapon over the body yet claiming her innocence. The traditional conventions are set in motion: The reader is set up to expect an investigation, numerous leads and dead ends, and ultimately a revelation. Just as the reader settles in for a murder mystery, Part 2 moves to Toronto and introduces an entirely new set of characters centered on a troubled young girl named Joey Reyes. Within these chapters, the narrative recounts different traumatic moments in Joey’s childhood and adolescence. The reader is left to wonder where Paris Peralta is and what is happening with the investigation into the bloody murder of the former sitcom superstar.

The novel is something of a supernova in the sense of Paris’s definition of the term. When Drew Malcolm appears at her patio in Seattle from her past, Paris panics. The past and present, she frets, will now fuse—she can no longer keep compartmentalized her dark past and the sustained performance of the present. This is the temporality that she calls a supernova, when a collision of matter and anti-matter implodes a star.

Things We Do in the Dark tests the fragility of linear temporality. Paris does not experience a life simply unspooled from birth to death. In this nonlinear narrative, chapter to chapter and sometimes within chapters, the narrative action shuttles back and forth across three decades. This device constructs the plot by exposing the secrets of the past and hence the epiphanies in the present. Hillier’s decision to tell the story in a nonlinear fashion introduces a theme critical to the novel: The Consequences of Secrets. As the reader moves back and forth, the very terrain of the narrative shifts and Hillier increasingly exposes Joey/Paris’s secrets: The past never stays past and secrets do not stay buried. The present in the novel has a tenuous and fragile dynamic with the past.