The Dark Chorus: Entertaining But Cluttered With Clichés

The Dark Chorus (2019) was four years in the making for Cambridge-based author Ashley Meggitt and its publication is a testament to hard work and commitment. Here is a quick look at this emerging indie writer's debut. 

Now, I don't usually like an opening line with a semi-colon in it. For me, it's far too early for them -- I'm not quite ready for the level of complexity that they introduce. I want something crisp and concise. So, I was already wary when I read Meggitt's first sentence: "I was born right here in this asylum -- literally into bedlam; delivered into a stark white-tiled cell, in what I've come to think of as The Screaming Room" (2019, p.3). I can't say that the promise of any room described as a "Screaming" one wouldn't keep me engaged, but I was looking forward to the "clear-eyed" writing that was I promised on the book's cover. 

Unfortunately, his prose remains stodgy throughout the novel. Meggitt clomps along in an unvaried assembly of clause>parenthetical subordinate>parenthetical subordinate: "I rise, extracting myself from the sleeping bag, feeling the cold air tug at my warmth, pulling it from my body to assimilate it into its cold collective" (2019, p.3). The text is so laden with unnecessary words that I found myself tumbling head-first into the main idea. Though once I've reached it, I'm too busy seeing stars from the fall to even notice what the author is trying to tell me. It's obvious that he had fun writing these sentences and beneath the waffle, there are some very nice ideas. Sadly, they're all fighting one another for my attention. 

Our protagonist is a thirteen-year-old unnamed orphan whose mother died delivering him in a padded cell. He makes it his raison d'etre to return to the, now abandoned, asylum where he was born and free his mother's soul from its walls. Oh, and the narrator is not your average thirteen-year-old orphan with a tragic backstory, no. He possesses all manner of supernatural gifts: he's a clairvoyant, a necromancer, a master of the occult, an empath and a mentalist. He also hears the souls of the dead and refers to their incessant voices as, "the dark chorus". 

The story begins with his attempt to put his mother’s untethered soul into a surrogate body (he procures a gloomy and hapless shopkeeper named Mrs Johnson for the role). The ritual works, but his mother's soul rejects the surrogate and in turn, her own son. The narrator is forced to kill the surrogate three days after its insemination in a gruesome scene that sees him slit her wrists and capture the fleeing soul in an empty "fire jar".

Now, it's no doubt that Horror is made of cliches but there are so many in this book's set-up that it's hard to find an original idea. There's the abandoned mental asylum, the traumatic backstory, an unholy ritual, and the all-too-predictable, special powers that are shared by the protagonist and a close-knit group of misfits. The writing style is thick with equally predictable gothic prose, though it's not as deftly executed as its presumable influences (Poe, Lovecraft, Stoker, Shelley...). We get lines like this for example: "The silver light of the moon soon gives way to the anaemic yellow of the streetlamps giving the medieval buildings a surreal and lifeless appearance" (2019, p.7).  Then -- in a scene remarkably similar to the veteran horror-author Clive Barker's novel, Candyman (1984) -- the narrator pours a collection of bumblebees into the deceased Mrs Johnson's mouth.

(Film adaptation of Candyman, 1992, dir. Bernard Rose)

As the novel drags on, the tone increasingly begins to sound like a young-adult novella (characters speak with a rhetorical, "yeah" at the end of every utterance or are referred to as "hoodies". It's a cringy attempt at saying, these are young people talking.) The narrator is sent to a correctional facility after the murder of Mrs Johnson where he befriends Makka -- a boy of Pakistani origin whose skin the narrator refers to as looking like a "new-born conker". Makka is constantly pummelled with racial slurs by the other inmates and this, along with the special bond that develops between him and the presumably white narrator, wears the Shawshank (Stephen King, 1982) influence down to the bone. 

(The Shawshank Redemption film adaptation, 1994, dir. Frank Darabont)

In another King-like section, we get a look at things from the perspective of Dr Eve Rhodes, the narrator's psychiatrist. While Eve is watching her own reflection in a tube-carriage window, she begins to recall her childhood obsession with mirrors and reflections: "When she was young she used to think that the world of dark reflections was real, that if she had wanted to, she could have stepped through, joined the others there who would understand -- understand her guilt and loneliness, her life with a mother who was never really there" (2019, p.24). It's a well-written passage which brings to life the brief and uncanny universe of a"dark [mirror] twin" that Eve has always suspected (2019, p.24). As it was too in a remarkably similar passage from Stephen King's 2016 short story, 'A Good Marriage' in the Full Dark, No Stars anthology:

At some point she found herself remembering the year in early childhood when she had gone around the house looking in mirrors. [...] She had been convinced that mirrors were doorways to another world, and what she saw reflected in the glass was not their living room or bathroom, but the living room or bathroom of some other family. [...] The little girl wasn't the same, either. Darcy was sure they were related -- sisters of the mirror? -- but no, not the same. [...] What interested her was that there was a whole other world behind the mirrors, and if you could walk through that other house (the Darker House) and out that door, the rest of the world would be waiting (King, p.369 - 370).

(Full Dark, No Stars. Stephen King, 2017.)

Some readers might be excited by Meggits experimental play with perspective. The Dark Chorus begins comfortably in a first-person perspective and remains there until the narrator is arrested and questioned for murder in Chapter 3. We then get an odd, 3rd limited perspective which is supposed to be both from the narrator's detached consciousness and a separate, neutral narrative eye. This is perhaps Meggitt's attempt at creating a cinematic experience but it makes the writing feel very amateur. 

What's strongest about this book is its emotional core. The three main characters are connected by their love for/ lack of mothers. Dr Eve Rhodes' mother is afflicted with the same madness as the narrator's late mother; Makka's mother was raped, and the narrator's mother died giving birth to him. Although it does get a bit oedipal at times, the love of a mother and a mother's love is handled with sincerity.

All in all, I admired this book's imagination but it's a miss for me. The author has clearly enjoyed writing every page. You can tell he's poured a lot of love into creating his world. It's only a shame that the final edit doesn't show it.