Dark Things I Adore

Nice plot and nicely paced, but some of the writing felt awkward, like the author was trying to be too literary or something.

A group of artistic misfits are gathered at an art camp in the Maine and if you’ve ever read Stephen King you know that’s perhaps not the safest place to be. While the dark things of the title refers to their collective art works, this is a pitch black tale of vengeance and an event so awful it will have repercussions long into the future. Split between the time at the camp in 1988 and a return visit made in 2008, we have to make the connections between as we sift through jealousy, love, obsession, abuse and exploitation. The art works are multi-layered paintings covered with notes, receipts and other emblems of that time in 1988. The most disturbing aspect of the artistic process occurs between Moss and Coral. Moss is the painter and Coral is his muse. Already asked to change their names to something from nature, to give them distance from their usual selves, as Moss becomes more inspired by Coral she in turn starts to disappear. This poses question about the self in art - is the subject really as they’re presented by the artist? Can the subject become so confused by the artist’s of her, she doesn’t know who she is or what is real anymore? Moss’s possession of Coral feels almost parasitic, so as he gains strength and vision she is more and more diminished. This was an edgy, atmospheric read that looked at psychological group dynamics through the lens of art.

Dark Things I Adore is a riveting, absorbing and profoundly disturbing debut thriller that revolves around narcissism, ambition, vengeance and souring relationships and is effectively a very Gone Girl-esque tale of atonement that proves that in the grasp of manipulative men, women may momentarily fall. But in the hands of fierce women, men will be brought to their knees. Audra Colfax is the star painting student at the Boston Institute for the Visual Arts. At her remote family home in the wilds of Maine, she's putting the final touches to her thesis project, Benefaction. It's ready for her advisor, the esteemed Max Durant, to come up and review on this chilly October weekend. He doesn't know that Audra has obsessively engineered every last detail of his visit. Or that it had to be him from the start, advising her, so she could get to him by doing what he does best. He has no idea she knows his worst secret and that's the sole reason why he's there. What comes to light, chapter by spellbinding chapter is that one grand, grotesque act of selfishness committed by Max as a young man, followed by years of manipulating women for art, has set into motion the machinery of his own fatal undoing.A man should pay for his crimes, and no one is more deserving of revenge than the women to whom he owes his career. He should go into this weekend far more vigilant, but he's distracted, as always, by an overwhelming desire to have his own way. But Audra, who is well aware that he's a monster, doesn't know everything that simmers beneath his surface. This is an enthralling and compulsively readable thriller from start to finish which is full of toxic relationships and deviant behaviour in which the hunter becomes the hunted. It is a carefully plotted tale that well and truly flips the script and eviscerates the notion that a powerful man may simply apologise for his transgressions regardless of what they are and move on unscathed. It's complex and multilayered and the slow-burning start soon builds to a crescendo along with the nail-biting suspense and an underlying feeling of pure dread and unpredictability. Told in dual timelines that merge to form a scintillating but ultimately chilling conclusion, Dark Things I Adore is a deliciously dark, captivating read that is fraught with tension and surprise reveals, peopled by a morally ambiguous cast of characters and narrated by a rather unreliable individual. Highly recommended.

This one intrigued me, and in the most part it was captivating. I liked the way the book was split into sections and the themes were interesting.I personally struggled with the thesis chapters that occur as I just couldn't visualise what was being portrayed and I think its difficult to describe art. Blame myself for the block, not the author.Good narrative, buckets of female rage and action.