Editor’s note: Welcome back to “Off the Shelf,” a new monthly feature on literature. Unlike our regular book coverage, which spotlights Western North Carolina authors, “Off the Shelf” gives local readers the chance to recommend any title — regardless of the author’s connection to the area. This month’s recommender is Kayla Pressley Seay, site manager of the Thomas Wolfe Memorial.
Admittedly, when I’m searching for my next read, I often get lost in the minutia of reviews and talk myself out of a book before I’ve even given the first sentence a passing glance. Fortunately, I stumbled upon Chris Whitaker’s recently published novel, All of the Colors of Darkness, when it was so new there were fewer than 10 reviews available online. Rather than move on to my next contender, I decided to treat this book like a blind date. Beyond the title, I knew nothing — no plot summary, no time period, not even a genre.
All the Colors of the Dark spans decades, beginning in a small Missouri town in 1975, when a young teen named Patch witnesses the near-abduction of a teen girl and chooses to bravely (or maybe foolishly) intervene, resulting in his own abduction. The subsequent pages move linearly through time with flashbacks to key moments, knitting together the experiences of Patch with those of his best friend, Saint, and her unwavering quest to find him.
Within the first few chapters, the book’s characters somehow felt familiar, like folks I’d known from my small town, and yet they were also unpredictably unique with their mannerisms and speech. It’s clear Whitaker felt no desire to stick with tropes and stereotypes as he fleshed out the dynamic central players. Similarly, Whitaker didn’t write with a single genre in mind. All the Colors of the Dark easily checks off multiple boxes: fiction, thriller, mystery, suspense and even romance.
As the site manager of the Thomas Wolfe Memorial, reading comes with the territory. I spend more time than I often realize on the quest for quotable quotes and reading passages from Thomas Wolfe’s writings. Folks who have read Wolfe know that brevity isn’t his strong suit. Wolfe loves excessive details and setting scenes often melts into rich prose. Perhaps this is why I felt at home reading All the Colors of the Dark, which at just over 600 pages is a commitment, to be sure. But Whitaker’s prose is so vivid and evocative, I challenge that any reader can see through the darkness.
I’ll close with one of my favorite lines from the book:
“At ten years old he realized that people were born whole, and that the bad things peeled layers from the person you once were, thinning compassion and empathy and the ability to construct a future. At thirteen he knew those layers could sometimes be rebuilt when people loved you. When you loved.”
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