True Grit meets Twin Peaks in This New Dark, a genre-bending debut novel by Chase Dearinger. This New Dark explores the haunted, broken hills of eastern Oklahoma, where over the course of just two cold days in November, the residents of Seven Suns will each face their own kind of weird.
This New Dark By Chase Dearinger
Review by Debra K Every
This New Dark may not have started out as a horror novel, but it sure as hell is one now.
Chase Dearinger was at Texas Tech working on his PHD when he began writing a series of stories for his dissertation. While doing his revisions he realized that what he’d rather be doing is writing a full-on horror novel.
Horror was Chase Dearinger’s go-to as a kid, yet when he entered college, literary fiction was the order of the day. But as he points out in an interview with Carrie Lee South at Horror Tree, “…when I discovered Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Faulkner, and those Southern Gothic writers, I was like, wait a minute, here’s a way back into horror.”
His literary chops are on full display in This New Dark.
The story is built on a scaffolding of beautiful evocative prose. And while this novel doesn’t begin with a gory scene; severed heads, bloody eyes, whatever; it gives the reader a taste of what’s to come by cleverly using literary turnings as thinly-veiled horror references.
“…the clouds blazed with the red and blue of what I could only imagine was the fiery breath of a monster, an eater of cowboy-junkies”
“He loved the idea that if you forced life’s face against the sharpening wheel, it would mutate, bend to your will…”
The story takes place over the course of two November days in Seven Suns, a small town in Eastern Oklahoma. Seven Suns is populated by the downtrodden, and the disenfranchised. Dearinger uses this heavy backdrop to create a world that threatens disaster at every turn. It is part crime novel, part supernatural horror. He has a firm grasp on both genres, effortlessly moving from one to another, while using a braided narrative in multiple POVs.
There’s Wyatt, a dope-growing Muscogee doing his best to care for his missing girlfriend’s belligerent teenaged son; Randy, the selfsame teenager, who hates the world and is struggling with the loss of his mother; Esther, a reluctant sheriff saddled with the care of her aging mother; and then…the preacher. (“His iris was black-rimmed and neon yellow like a cat”) Best to leave him for the reader to discover.
The characters are beautifully drawn, three dimensional, with the kind of personal demons that make them human.
Wyatt struggles with the loss of his girlfriend while trying to do right by her son even though there is no relationship between them. He even refers to him as ‘the kid’ rather than use the boy’s name. And all the while, he’s obsessed by a black panther that he has captured on his game camera. His insistence that it exists makes him the laughing stock of the town.
Randy has all the angst of many a teenager. He misses his mother, worried that she might be dead, while struggling with his own sexuality, a battle made all the more uncomfortable with his best friend’s mother coming on to him. We watch as his anger threatens to drag him into the very same hopelessness with which he is surrounded.
Edith has the most profound character arc in the novel.
She starts out as an insecure woman working as a bailiff, stretched to her limits as she takes care of her aging mother. We can’t help but be touched, as she puts together sentences from the magnetic word tiles on her refrigerator every morning hoping to find strength in the sentences she creates. Circumstances force her into the role of sheriff at the very moment grizzly happenings strike. She gets no respect from the townspeople who know her as shrinking, insecure Edith. But by the end of the novel, she has found her way into the job, fearlessly running toward danger.
These three characters are surrounded by similarly laden townspeople going about their day-to-day in ‘this new dark’—what the residents call the early evening that comes when daylight savings time is in effect. The overcast sky creates shadows, both real and symbolic, that make the violent undercurrents of family, addiction, and death even more destructive
If I have any issue, it’s with the final “battle”. I would have liked more. More clarity. More detail. Just more. And the coda of the book felt a bit longer than I would have liked.
All that being said, Dearinger is a master storyteller with a firm grasp of multiple stylistic wordsmithing. Never too much, always on point; the suspense, perfectly spun, as it pushes us deeper into the story. Truth be told, This New Dark is unputdownable. One of the best I’ve read this year. I look forward to reading Chase Dearinger’s next efforts.
This New Dark By Chase Dearinger
Publisher : Belle Point Press

Chase Dearinger’s debut novel combines the grit of True Grit and the eerie atmosphere of Twin Peaks. Set in the haunted, broken hills of eastern Oklahoma. This New Dark unfolds over just two cold days in November, as the residents of Seven Suns each confront their own strange challenges.
Wyatt, a Muscogee who grows dope, becomes obsessed with a black cougar that defies explanation, disrupting his life. Randy, the teenager living with him, grapples with outrage at the world, confusion about his sexuality. And the haunting memory of his mother’s bones. Meanwhile, Esther—a God-fearing court bailif. Unexpectedly becomes the county sheriff and must find a missing girl whose disappearance sets a chain of events into motion. Uniting them all is a nameless cowboy junky, who may or may not be some ancient shape-shifting evil. Together, they must confront this new dark while navigating the tumultuous forces of family, religion, addiction, and death.
The Heart and Soul of Horror Book Review Websites
Discover more from The Ginger Nuts of Horror Review Website
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.