I am not usually a short story fan, but the cover and the title drew me into this one, and I'm so glad it did. Absolutely beautiful. I've been loving them so much that I dole them out slowly, reading one and mulling it over for quite a while before picking it back up again. This is one I may need to get a print copy of, just so I can pick it up off my shelf and read it tangibly whenever.

I love short stories, and the description on this collection sounded promising. Sadly, the stories didn't live up to the hype. Each and every story ended in a dud...a rocket that never exploded. It was hard to keep connected to the characters, their voices did not ring true or clear for me. I felt like the author was trying to explore these ideas of love and really coming up empty. A rather disappointing read, especially since I couldn't stop after three stories (when I realized I wasn't enjoying them at all).

The Dark and Other Love Stories is a riveting collection of 13 strange, sensual, and compelling explorations of different facets of the dark, love, and friendship. I’ve been blown away by the many different contemporary short story collections by women that have been published recently, and Deborah Willis did not disappoint!

A girlfriend decides to sign up to go to Mars and doesn’t tell her boyfriend. A man feeds and cares for a crow as if it was his pet. Two girls sneak out in the middle of the night while at camp, but simply to watch the horses. A woman finds a hole in her living room that apparently only she can see. The love Willis explores expands age, romance, family ties, and species, reflected in the various stories the author conveys in sharp, beautiful prose. I found both humor and aching emotion within the pages and was delighted by both the realism and bit of fantasy as Willis describes the power and depth of love and darkness.

In conclusion, The Dark and Other Love Stories is weird, raw, and haunting, and I would not hesitate to recommend this book to any reader of contemporary short fiction.

Many thanks to the publisher for the review copy from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I was on the fence for most this collection of what to rate them. They were good, true, but nothing particularly jumped out at me that would push them over the threshold of three stars. It wasn’t until I read “The Ark” that there was a spark. With this spark, I started to reevaluate the whole set and realized something: these stories were more than just about love in various forms. It wasn’t always about the love that two people show openly to other people, but it was about the love that they keep buried deep, the love that they don’t really talk about.

Like the dark, there is something just below the surface. The reader can’t always trust the narrator completely, and that adds another layer to the story. Did Kevin’s girlfriend really go to Mars, or was he high and imagining the whole thing? Was there really a hole in Steve and Lauren’s living room, or was that a representation of their marriage and life together?

The overarching theme of this collection is that the dark obscures the truth, and as a result, we (the readers) are left floundering with an incomplete sense of the narrative. Love itself is also dark and mysterious, but it is also revealing when we bring it to the light.

Willis’ prose was beautiful and often had an almost ethereal feel to it. One of my favorite quotes was from “The Ark.”

I lived in a fog, a beautiful fog like in paintings of winter, of ocean. Memories passed by like clouds on the other side of a window.


I really enjoyed each of the stories published in this collection. The cover was beautiful and further conveyed the theme nicely. Four stars.

Thank you to NetGalley and W. W. Norton & Company for an advanced copy of this eBook in exchange for an honest review.

This is a solid collection of contemporary short fiction from Deborah Willis. Many of the stories take place in the dark, either literally or figuratively: In the titular "The Dark," which I adored, two girls at a summer camp sneak out at night, but not for the usual reasons. Instead of fooling around with boys, they take to the forest, where they watch the "riding" horses in secret. Under the soft light of the moon, these old and overworked mares are transformed into creatures magical and otherworldly.

Equally lovely is "Last One to Leave," in which two young people whose lived were changed by World War II (a very dark time in our collective history, indeed) meet in the Canadian wilderness. Sydney brings and end to Havyril's muteness and, when he dies many years later, her own voice goes with him. All the while, the couple bears witness as their remote logging town crumbles and falls around them.

“We were hungry for feral time. That’s why we loved the dark.”

There is something feral about girls on the cusp of womanhood, what better place than camp to explore the dark things the world wants to protect them from. One friend always seems to be the one who pushes the limits more, the one who should end up as a face on a milk carton if what the grown ups warn is true. There is a pulsing hunger for danger and a paralyzing fear of it. The Dark is not so much in the young girls hunger and desires but in the world itself. Nothing happens, everything happens. Each story continues in this vein, people stepping out of ordinary acceptable behavior like in Optimus Prime when a father struggles with 12 steps and gives his son a Halloween night law abiding parents wouldn’t. In my personal favorite The Arc, “I lived in fog, a beautiful fog like in paintings of winter. Memories passed by like clouds on the other side of a window” there is nothing beautiful about Leanna’s suffering, but the strangeness of the turns her life takes pulled me in. Love and hate are the same emotion sometimes, and both can be our salvation or damnation.The mind and body don’t always heal, sometimes you just live through the fog. I felt for Leanna as much as I feel for a character in a long novel. She is every woman who has placed her faith in the wrong person, because at some point in life- most of us do. Life drags her along confused, broken and trapped in an endless fog unable to answer “Why is God so mean sometimes?”

This is a dark and strange collection. Some moments are small, but life altering. I can’t wait to read more by Willis.

Publication Date: February 14, 2017

W.W. Norton & Company