"I'd pretty much do anything for you" - Finn

Trudy and Brue Harrison are driving home from a weeklong vacation when they spy the almost hidden Ocean View gallery and decide to check it out. Turns out to be something of a mistake as the large building harbours a dark secret, and a serial killer with specific requirements. Trudy with the help of Bruce manage to overcome their assailant in a hidden workshop, however Bruce takes it all too far and kicks the resident Dexter to death.

Fearing discovery the couple hide the truth from their children, parents, and friends, going to some lengths to destroy evidence. Eventually they go to an unbelieving Police and are left wondering if there isn't a conspiracy against them with a wealthy American philanthropist seemingly watching their every move. When a new tenant, Finn, moves into one of their townhouses paranoia is turned up as he seems to be taking undue interest in Trudy and her youngest daughter Summer. Was there a second person at the gallery on the fateful morning they visited and is this person looking to tie up some loose ends?

So the scene is I'm strolling around my local church of consumerism having picked up the grits for dinner when I note a new shop has recently opened. Think it replaced one of those phone places that misjudged the number of teen chicks in my neighbourhood who simply must have a texting device. Anyways if you're one of our younger readers then you might want to sit down, this is shocking, the new store was a "book store"! Yes that's right, an actual physical place selling a range of books and without an electronic device in sight, praise the Lord - guess that would be David Jones in our scenario. Long story short they had one copy of After the Darkness left, and I scarfed that up quicker than you can say "going out of business sale" as I had jived to Honey Brown's first novel Red Queen and figured someone should review the book. Unfortunately since the cover had a quote from the Australian Women's Weakly no one else put their hand up for the book report, so discarding various dog possibilities here's my homework ... and a red apple.

Robert Kirkman, and if you don't know who Rob is then get the frack out now you're on the wrong site, has stated that he created The Walking Dead as he always wanted to know what happens next after the end credits rolled in classic zombie movies. In a similar way Honey Brown approaches the psycho novel from the viewpoint of what effect the encounter in an isolated location would have on a couple of normal people who managed to survive. However Ms Brown goes one step beyond and seeks to address Friedrich Nietzsche's thought, "if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you", how exactly will the exposure to violence affect the future actions of a couple not predisposed to overt violence. Don't worry Ms Brown isn't going to load up the dramatic overtones and send us into a parlour room full of hand wringing and wailing at the inequities of the universe, there's still plenty of action headed your way kids.

The novel naturally starts with introducing our main characters, firming that requirement of the Reader identifying them, before throwing the fatted calf to the wolf as we make the Ocean View gallery in fairly quick fashion. We then get a fairly harrowing section of the novel where Trudy and Bruce become victims of a sadistic madman, albeit in a fairly unique setting. What Ms Brown does well here, between describing what's going down, is to leave the main festivities off the page. Hate to tell ya folks, but you are going to have to work out for yourself just what happened to Bruce in a room we never get to view firsthand. And this is the first block of the book, from there we move to paranoia, a degree of unease about who else was in the house and just how far their influence extends, and the central focus of After the Darkness, just how far would someone go to protect their selves and family? To paraphrase Romero in terms of a psycho thriller, "they are us and we are them". Pretty heady stuff really and you will be pumping through the pages as things deteriorate for our main characters. Is there a resolution? Your call on that particular requirement, though since we're not really looking at a sequel that I can see we can probably sign off on one.

What's interesting about After the Darkness, besides the book being a bloody good read, is that Honey Brown has set her main white middle class family, in a white middle class township that almost reads as the Australian Stepford. What the novel hammers away at is the old trope that Civilisation is a very thin veneer over the cracks caused by chaos entering normal lives. Hence we are definitely in horror territory with this one. It really is no surprise when the Harrisons leave their home in Delaney, the township has become alien to their new found reality, the fact that they then try and recreate their lives in another middle class paradise should equally come as no surprise. Is Honey Brown hitting the theme that we all crave our comfort zones? - another question you'll have to answer for yourself after reading the novel. What is apparent to even a casual read however is that there is more going down here than what one may have expected. But then we should have known the Author would have dug under the skin considering the previously published Red Queen.

Overall I guess the gorehounds are going to be very disappointed, there's a prevailing feeling of nastiness when the red hits the meat cleaver but Honey Brown doesn't go out of her way to draw things in graphic detail. The blood seeps through the pages rather than being splattered across them. Equally don't dial into After the Darkness if after one of those sexed up PR outings, while not being prim and proper, there also isn't a lot in the titillation department for the female demographics to get hot and bothered over.

What you do get is a well written tale of paranoia and creeping dread that almost forces you to turn the page to see what happens next. Honey Brown has dived into the quiet waters of atmospheric horror and constructed a plot that flows without disruption to a conclusion that might best be described as a truce between conflicts. Pure horror aficionados might be at pains to point out this novel isn't for them, but then there are plenty of spare rooms at the horror manse, try another one to see if the atmosphere might surprise. Well recommended novel for fans of the darker genre and fans of the thriller outing, a tightly woven tale of tension that will have you staying up late to finish.

I scored a copy of After the Darkness via the new Dymocks store that opened up at our local mall. The chick behind the counter could tell me I brought the last copy of the twenty they originally ordered in, but a second order was already placed. So in the wash up the novel should be available at your local bookstore and if not then it has probably sold out, ask when new stock is arriving. My copy had a $20 price tag, sucks to be us to be honest, so put that down as your benchmark. For foreign readers, any of the major online outlets should carry the book. Now I've got to hunt out Honey Brown's second novel, The Good Daughter.