The Darkness Below opens up on Halloween night, with an old man telling tales of terror to a handful of neighborhood children. The three kids are gathered ’round in his living room, hours after the other tikes have gone home to gobble their treats. As the old man unravels his yarn, he gets more and more excited… until finally, his heart can’t take it anymore. When he dies, then is revived, he brings something back with him.

Mental hitch-hikers is what Eide calls them. It’s as good a term as any, and the premise is intriguing and intelligent. Each child is “chosen” by one of these creatures, and when the story fast-forwards to their adult lives, it is revealed that two are evil, and one is good.

At first, it’s hard to figure out whether these creatures are real, or whether they are figments of fancy. It’s also hard to figure out whether they come from the other side of life, another planet, or another mental plane. At first the mystery is fun, but after while I began to feel as though I was supposed to decide for myself, as no clues were given me.

Victoria Mayfield is the protagonist of The Darkness Below. She was the child leeched onto by the “good” mental hitch-hiker (Curalis), while her friends, Anthony Hart and Michelle Brown, were latched onto by the “bad” otherworldly parasites (Krinel and Domantrian). It is apt that the latter two creatures are vampires, greedily guiding their two human counterparts to extract the blood from anyone they can find. 

They are smart killers though, careful to cover their tracks. For years, the slayings are blamed on a London blood cult. While the story is set in the U.S., the character’s jobs with an airline permit them to do some jetting about, allowing for some interesting changes in locale. Victoria, fighting on the side of good, sets out to stop her once-friends from killing anyone else.

While it is made clear that Victoria can only visit her hitch-hiker, Curalis, in dreams, not much is shown from the POV of Michelle and Anthony. In the first part of the book, there is a great, tension-filled nail-biting scene, in which Anthony and Michelle kidnap, toy with, then subsequently kill and drain, the wrong woman (it turns out her sister is a Sensitive, who ties in with the other characters later on). Eide has a flair for horror writing but unfortunately, he doesn’t showcase that talent nearly enough.

The book flounders in some places, and seems to try to be too many things at once while focusing on the minutiae — Victoria is jobless throughout much of the book, and her search for employment does get a bit tedious at times. There is one section in the book when, bored, she goes to the movies. She decides to see Interview With The Vampire. It’s certainly one of my favorite movies of all time, but by insinuating that it’s a first-run film Victoria is seeing, it dates the book in 1994 for no reason. Also, Eide mentions the vampire character Gabrielle in one of the scenes, when in fact she did not appear in the movie version at all. (I know — now who’s focusing on the minutiae?)

While I definitely would have been happier with more chills and thrills, and found myself skimming through some passages, I kept finding myself wanting to see what would happen next.

I loved the strange visions, foreboding nightmares, psychic dreams, and elements of the supernatural interwoven with the sci-fi mystery. How did the otherworldly creatures manage to escape? Who are they? How will their mission in our world change our time/space continuum? These questions are enough to keep you reading, though at times the journey is more a task than a trek. Eide has definite imagination and writing talent, but in my humble opinion, he and his readers would be well-served by a more aggressive editor.

Reviewed by Staci Layne Wilson