Book Review
Title: The Dark Chorus by Ashley Meggitt
Genre: Horror, Suspense
Rating: 4.5 Stars
I didn’t know anything about The Dark Chorus going into it but with this kind of book I felt that was a good thing. I will say that the religious overtones of the synopsis made me really weary despite this falling perfectly into my favourite genre and I wasn’t sure how those themes were going to come into play. The opening of The Dark Chorus was actually pretty interesting as we are introduced to a unnamed boy born in an asylum taken from his mother shortly after birth. However, he remembers being born because they essentially bound themselves to each other before he was taken away. He develops gifts as a child to influence others which is why he was never adopted and when he felt his mother die he held onto her soul forcing her to be trapped in what he calls the Dark Chorus, a collection of souls bound to the asylum sort of like purgatory. At 13 he has been having dreams instructing him on how to capture and bind a soul so he returns to the asylum and waits for the perfect moment to find and capture his mother’s soul which he does. However, he takes it a step further by finding a woman who his mother could essentially possess so they can be together again. This doesn’t go the way the boy planned as his mother still suffer from whatever landed her in the asylum in the first place and he performs the ritual again, killing his mother and binding her soul once more. However, during this ritual the police and someone concerned for the woman find the boy in the middle of killing the woman possessed by his mother and I can’t wait to see where this goes.
As we approach the ¼ mark in the novel, the boy is obviously arrested for the murder of the woman and even though he explains everything honestly to the police they don’t believe him and he is sent to what I believe is a juvenile detention centre and here he meets a young boy full of rage named Makka Noorani. At first Makka and the boy don’t get on but Makka very quickly realises that there is something very special about the boy and begins going out of his way to protect him even if it means putting himself at risk which he does more than once. However, the boy soon gets cornered by I believe one of the guards who likes to sexual assault the children and has chosen the boy as his next target. Makka arrives in time to help but it is the boy who ends the fight as he literally steals the man’s soul and takes it into his own body but the man is somehow still alive. After swiping his key card, Makka realises he is still alive and give the man a fitting end before they escape flagging down a cat and stealing it before making off into the night. During this time we are also following Eve, the psychiatrist who has an almost unnatural interest in the boy because they are very similar and when they are obviously called to the detention centre they quickly learn that the boy and Makka are missing and the body left behind has all the calling cards of the boy and I have a feeling a hunt for them is going to begin as both are seen as very dangerous.
As we cross the ¼ mark in the novel, Makka and the boy take the drugs and money from the car they jacked before getting on the tube to get to an abandoned hospital. The hospital is a squatters building and apparently somewhere Makka has stayed before. The boy just seems to be following Makka’s lead as he searches for his father who has a lot of hatred towards because of what he did to Makka’s mother and he intends to kill him. One night they are in a closed down café waiting for Makka’s father to make an appearance from the pub across the street when a man chases a girl intending to rape her. When she falls and headbutts the window, the boy looks into her eyes and decides that he needs her. The night before the boy was given LSD for the first time and during his trip he had what I can only call a vision where he realised a last shard of an angel’s soul is inside him and in order for this shard to re-join the rest of its soul it needs to be cleansed by taking killing those with dark souls. When the boy locks eyes with the girl, he decides that she will join him and Makka and they head outside to help her. After tying the man up and bringing him inside Makka looks to the boy for guidance as he has been following his instruction and the boy intends to kill him especially after seeing how dark this man’s soul is. Before they can commence with the killing, the man’s friends come looking for him and they are able to misdirect them. While we don’t see the kill, we do see the boy manipulating both Makka and the girl who is called Vee unconsciously or they are just drawn to him and does what he asks of them. By the time the police discover the body the kids are long gone but the police are aware that the boy and Makka are now working with a girl but they still don’t understand what the killings are for as many see them as religious but the boy claimed they weren’t.
As we approach the halfway mark in the novel, the novel was beginning to get a little strange for my liking as the boy, Makka and Vee evade the police more than once thanks to the boy. However, he does stop to send Eve the information she needs to look up on Charles Janenssen and Banuism. It turns out that the boy isn’t the first one to have these gifts or as the adults see it hallucinations as Charles Janenssen was the first to be documented about it and it all stems back to the practise of Banuism and the story of the angel. It seems that the angel protected the humans from being bound to the darkness but its soul was shattered in the process and the boy is somehow in possession of one of these shards. He also knows he has to reunite the shard with the rest of the angel’s soul but he can’t do that until the shard has been cleansed and that can only be done by sacrificing those with dark or corrupt souls which is what the trio have been doing. Eve is beginning to piece together the information but neither she nor the police believe that someone can actually have powers like this and that the boy must be insane. We also learn that there was a purpose in the boy collecting Makka and Vee as they represent Rage and Pain respectively also known as the Seers whereas the boy is Arta or Judgement and the ritual of cleansing can only be performed by the three of them. We are also aware that the boy has given Eve the task of finding his mother’s soul wherever it has been housed and to bring it to him but I don’t know how that is going to play out. We also get some political intrigue as Vee or Victoria seems to be the daughter of a high-ranking police officer and that she ran away a few weeks ago and the men chasing them have been hired by her father to bring her home and he is also one of the men they are aiming to kill along with Makka’s father.
As we cross into the second half of the novel, I was still pretty confused by what was happening but it was coming together piece by piece. We see the two sides fighting, one trying to catch the other and one trying to stay ahead. Since the boy showed Makka and Vee the Dark Chorus they have been more willing to do whatever he says and do whatever needs to be done for him especially since he has offered to kill both of their fathers in exchange for their help. Eve, meanwhile, has been piecing the story together but it seems that the kids are always one step ahead of them most likely due to the boy’s visions. However, Eve’s motivation si changing rather than wanting to catch the boy to understand him as she did in the beginning of the novel, she is now helping him as she takes the jar containing his mother’s soul for the evidence lock up which is a crime in itself. During this scene whether the boy allowed or whether she had the power already it seems that Eve can see the soul the same way the boy would which brings her to tears in a good way because of how beautiful it is. Now the police and Eve fully understand the boy’s mission even if they believe he is crazy, however, the kids all know that eventually they will be caught and go to prison but the boy believes that might not be the case. He seems to think that if they cleanse the angel’s soul then it in return will set them free, whether that means dying I am not sure but I can’t wait to see how the novel comes together.
As we approach the ¾ mark in the novel, we see the trio getting ready to carry out the final part of their plan to cleanse the angel’s soul once and for all but the boy does go and meet with Eve first. He can tell that Eve has all the information she needs now about his motives and why he is doing what he is doing but she refuses to believe him. However, when he mentions the shadow world she inhabited as a child and how she could have be an Arta like him if she hadn’t have closed herself off to that world it makes her question everything she has believed until this point which is why she continues to help him even when she knows what he is doing is wrong. I don’t think it is that wrong as the boy is only targeting corrupt individuals and two of their victims have been child abusers. We also find out more about the motivations of Makka and Vee, Makka’s father raped his mother because she was Asian and he regularly abused his new girlfriend and their daughter, Holly, who is the only reason Makka decided to help her. Vee on the other hand has been abused presumably by her father sexually and loaned out to anyone he decided which has left her with severe mental scars and it is the main motivation for wanting her father dead. However, her father is very important in the police community and killing him won’t be easy. When the men sent by Vee’s father finally catch up to them, the boy takes this as the sign to but the final part of his “plan” into action although saving Vee is main priority, killing her father is just a bonus.
As we cross into the final section of the novel, I was really excited to see how the novel ended and whether everything would tie up neatly especially since this book is under 300 pages and it has packed a lot into that. I really liked the ending of this novel and seeing everything come full circle at the end but with just a tiny opening that leaves the fate of the characters up to the reader. I was a little worried going into the novel that it was going to be overly religious but it was more spiritual than religious. It doesn’t dominate the novel either, yes it is mentioned frequently and it is a point the characters are always brought back to but it really takes a back seat to the journey these characters go on. For a novel that is less than 250 pages long it really tackled so hard hitting topics like sexual abuse, domestic abuse, race and so much more without them taking over the novel. I really liked the diversity in the characters and how their dynamic worked and overall I have to say The Dark Chorus really surprised me and I would definitely recommend this book and I will be picking up more by Meggitt in the future.
Buy it here:
Paperback/Hardcover: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
Kindle Edition: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
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