Book Review: Darker Days by Thomas Olde Heuvelt
Every year, the five families who live on Bird Street enjoy a charmed existence, becoming tremendously skilled in whatever they put their mind to, achieving all their ambitions, and able to afford anything they can dream of. They are happy people, with happy lives – but once a year, they have to pay the price for all that happiness.
Each November, they must take someone out to the woods that surround their little neighbourhood, and kill them. The Bird Street families have always seen this as a matter of euthanasia, finding someone with a terminal illness and offering them a chance to end their lives in a comfortable, peaceful way. Usually it all goes off without a hitch, but this year, their chosen ones keeps changing their mind at the last minute. And the further into November they get without a sacrifice, the more nightmarish their lives become.
Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s Darker Days has a great premise. What a shame then, that the execution does not live up to it. The book opens with a character list, noting the twenty people and four animals (two alpacas, two dogs) that currently live on Bird Street, as well as a family of three who used to live there before. That list seems to imply we’re about to read something of an ensemble piece, but because most of the characters remain a sludgy, homogenous mass throughout the duration, in actuality, we just really get to know one family – the Lewis de Silvas. The novel is told from their shifting perspectives, chapters being led by the POV of either mother Luana, father Ralph, fifteen-year-old daughter Kaila, or ten-year-old son Django.
At around four hundred pages, this is a long book, and the fact that the supporting players remain so sketched out makes it feel all the longer. Frankly, it also makes the frequent set pieces, where Heuvelt likes to gather all his characters in one of the family houses for a heated meeting, quite confusing.
It’s hard to parse why the book is as long as it is in the first place; it’s not an exaggeration to say that this story could have been told in half as many pages. There are interesting passages here – the opening attempted sacrifice is eerie and atmospheric, and the horrific event that kicks the second half into gear is quite gripping – but they are far outnumbered by the endless generically spooky dead ends and red herrings, or the characters just talking their same predicaments out over and over. Heuvelt (a Dutch author, writing in English) also has an unfortunate habit of littering Darker Days with clunky American cultural references which are both distractingly niche, and certain to age his novel before its time.
Despite that premise and the promising opening, surprisingly little of Darker Days is concerned with the ethical ramifications of the devil’s bargain the residents of Bird Street first made all those years ago. And when the ending finally does arrive, it is really not worth all that build up.
Darker Days is published by Bantam on 23 October 2025
