A Map of the Dark

by John Dixon

Halloween will never be the same . . .
Halloween night, 1963, in De Pere, Wisconsin, and all is not well. Evelyn Schmidt's life is almost at an end. she has cancer and has been given only days to live, But she'll be damned if she'll go quietly, in the hospital or at home. She's heading for the Idle Hour to drink up a storm, whether her fellow drinkers want her there or not. Steve Omsted is only sixteen, but he feels his life might...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1953835058
• ISBN13: 9781953835055
• Release Date: July 2022
• Publisher: Visible Spectrum
• Length: 142 Pages
• Weight: 0.37 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Powerful and Painful

This short novel is an uncompromising study of social dynamics in interlocking groups of children, teenagers, and adults in a small town on an extremely eventful night. A foolish murder plot, its concealment, a moving attempt to foil it, and its execution and aftermath provide the suspenseful through-line. The different age groups are delightfully characterized but the point of the novel lies in the universality of the drives they have in common. The style is mostly a highly effective just-the-facts objectivity. This objectivity extends even to the use of a "real time" technique, where every moment in a block of time seems to be accounted for; this can be effective but can also try the reader's memory and patience. Though the author's intellectual agenda sometimes gets in the way of his story (leading to some symbolic actions that jar against the overall hyper-realism), his relentless concentration on the pain of exclusion and the torments of loneliness gives this book a primal power that makes a lot of literature seem tepid.