7/3/2023 0 Comments Marina sergey dyachenkoIndeed, the story starts off relatively innocently: Alexey Igorevich Grimalsky (aka DJ Aspirin), walking home at night from one of his gigs, discovers a girl (hugging a teddy bear) huddled alone in the dark near his apartment building. Both of these novels start from a deceptively simple premise: What if an intelligent young woman was offered free tuition at an elite university? Or what if a modestly successful disc jockey and radio host allowed a seemingly lost young girl to spend the night at his apartment? Only the Dyachenkos could so patiently spin out these tales, giving them texture and depth, slowly filling the reader with a kind of cosmic horror that has no need of grotesque monsters.ĭaughter from the Dark exerts its power on us precisely because the Dyachenkos walk that fine line of hinting at malevolent forces while never really acknowledging (and definitely not describing) them. One can’t help but compare this latest novel in English by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko to their previous work of psychological horror/dark fantasy, Vita Nostra (2018), both beautifully translated from the Russian by Julia Meitov Hersey. But Daughter from the Dark doesn’t just offer readers an example of kindness backfiring it takes the cynical statement to a whole other terrifying level such that, like the protagonist, we are left questioning our own judgments and assumptions. “No good deed goes unpunished”: rarely has an aphorism been so vividly rendered in fiction.
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