Darkly by Marisha Pessl
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quippeThe Blurb On The Back:
What would you kill for?
A seemingly ordinary teenager girl.
A mysterious internship.
A games designer with a dark legacy.
Arcadia ‘Dia’ Gannon has long been obsessed with Louisiana Veda, whose games company, Darkly, now lies dormant after her death. It has a cult following for its ingenious and utterly terrifying games. When an ad for an internship appears, Dia is shocked to be chosen, along with six other teenagers from around the world.
Thrust into the enigmatic heart of Darkly, Dia and her fellow interns discover hidden symbols, buried clues and a web of intrigue.
This summer will be the most twisted Darkly game of all.
17-year-old Arcadia ‘Dia’ Gannon knows that she’s the school weirdo. Her mum, Gigi, owns an antiques shop in Eminence, Missouri but it’s Dia who keeps it going. Not only does she look after Agatha and Basil (the elderly assistants who are supposed to help run the shop) but she also tries to rein in her mum’s wilder purchases and inappropriate relationships. Dia dresses like someone from the 1920s and the closest she’s ever come to a relationship is when she snogged Choke Newington in the stairwell at school even though he immediately pretended that it never happened and later asked out the impossibly attractive Hailee.
One of the only cool things in Dia’s life is her love of Darkly games. Created by the legendary Louisiana Veda, 13 games were mass produced for the public while she was alive and another 15 discovered after her tragic death in 1985. Darkly games have a cult following, heralded for their imagination and the way they both draw players in and leave them completely terrified. Original versions very rarely come up for sale and when they do, they sell for millions of pounds.
Now the Louisiana Veda Foundation is seeking applications for its first ever summer internship programme in England. 7 individuals will each be be paid £2000 per week. Every Darkly fan in the world applies for a position, but Dia is amazed when hers is successful, making her one of what the internet calls the Veda Seven along with Poe Valois III (the fiercely intelligent son of a ridiculously wealthy French family), Franz-Luc Hoffbinhauer (who is from Germany and whose mum is multiply divorced), Cooper Min (from Washington, USA, who wants to become a funeral director), Torin Kelly (from Ireland, who is adopted and wants more than ever to find her birth parents as she splits her time between a party loving mum and alcoholic father), Everleigh Aradóttir (from Iceland, who has taken the place of her Darkly-obsessed step-sister who died before learning she was successful), and Mouse Bonetti (from Nigeria).
Soon the Veda Seven are in London under the management of Nile Raiden from the prestigious Derringer Street Chambers, which administers the Louisiana Veda Foundation. Raiden explains the real purpose of the internship: on the night that Louisiana Veda held a party to celebrate the 15th anniversary of her company’s foundation at the private island where she lived and worked someone stole the only copy of a 29th game called Valkyrie. Despite her best efforts, Louisiana never found it before her death and Derringer Street Chambers had no luck.
Then 6 months ago. Derringer Chambers learnt that teenagers are playing Valkyrie and the first person rumoured to have won it - 15-year-old George Grenfell - has gone missing. The Veda Seven are tasked with finding out how and where Valkyrie is being played and finding George. If they do, then they will each get £1 million and exclusive ownership of a Darkly game, including the licensing and gaming rights to the same.
Living on Louisiana’s island, Dia and the other interns search for clues to try and break the mystery. But Dia soon realises that solving Valkyrie’s mystery means digging into Louisiana’s past and the very foundation of the Darkly games …
I struggled to buy into the premise of Marisha Pessl’s standalone YA thriller as very little about it actually makes sense. It’s further hampered by one-dimensional characterisation (I struggled to remember who was who in the Veda Seven), a rote love triangle between two equally blah male characters. What really threw me out was how little research Pessl had done on English law or geography, which irritated me throughout the whole book.
This book should have absolutely been up my street. I enjoy a good thriller and was really looking forward to reading one set in the world of board games. Pessl gives Dia a strong first person narrative voice and the way she sets out her backstory (including sketching her relationship with her mum) is well done. However I thought Pessl tried far too hard to make Dia “unique” with the clothes and lack of friends while I found her crush on Choke was predictable rather than believable.
The immediate issue I had though was that I simply didn’t believe in the premise of Louisiana Veda’s legendary games having such a cult following. This is partly because Pessl can’t decide if they’re a niche cult, a luxury obsession or a form of mass entertainment, which means that there’s a lack of consistency in terms of their public recognition. This is an issue when Pessl tries to establish it as an underground activity that only teenagers are doing because the amount of work and people involved in it made me wonder how anyone was having trouble tracking down the people behind it.
The bigger issue for me though is that Pessl clearly hasn’t done much research on how the English legal profession works or what our geography is. Specifically she uses terms that simply don’t exist (Nile Raiden is a “senior barrister” - something that does not exist), confuses barristers with solicitors (the work that Derringer Chambers does is actually work that a solicitor’s firm would do) and then has them engage Choke as a legal intern (something that barristers’ chambers don’t typically do). I get that most teenage readers won’t understand this, but unfortunately this is my wheelhouse and it’s not difficult to find out how it works so when it isn’t accurate, it throws me out. Similarly Pessl has the Veda Seven living on an island in the North Sea, but apparently they can just drive into and out of London in an hour or so and apparently only need a few hours to sail to the Atlantic.
The characterisation of the Veda Seven is poor. Only Poe has any kind of development and it’s all predictable and Dia’s attraction to him doesn’t seem to rise beyond the fact that he’s rich and arrogant. Pessl puts in the obligatory YA love triangle with the equally under-characterised Choke and it’s as predictable and lacking in chemistry as you would expect.
I know that I am being hard on the book and I should say that there are some interesting ideas here notably in the way that Pessl links the development and objectives of Valkyrie to Louisiana’s backstory. There are equally moments in the game itself that are genuinely unnerving and I did enjoy watching Dia working out some of the twists and turns, even though some of it is more luck than intelligence. I equally thought that the message in the ending was an interesting one, albeit one that I really wished had been developed more as a theme in the main storyline.
Ultimately, though there was just more that I disliked about this book than I could find to enjoy and as such, I can’t say that I would rush to read Pessl’s other books on the strength of it.
The Verdict:
I struggled to buy into the premise of Marisha Pessl’s standalone YA thriller as very little about it actually makes sense. It’s further hampered by one-dimensional characterisation (I struggled to remember who was who in the Veda Seven), a rote love triangle between two equally blah male characters. What really threw me out was how little research Pessl had done on English law or geography, which irritated me throughout the whole book.
DARKLY was released in the United Kingdom on 28th November 2024. Thanks to Walker Books for the review copy of this book.
A seemingly ordinary teenager girl.
A mysterious internship.
A games designer with a dark legacy.
Arcadia ‘Dia’ Gannon has long been obsessed with Louisiana Veda, whose games company, Darkly, now lies dormant after her death. It has a cult following for its ingenious and utterly terrifying games. When an ad for an internship appears, Dia is shocked to be chosen, along with six other teenagers from around the world.
Thrust into the enigmatic heart of Darkly, Dia and her fellow interns discover hidden symbols, buried clues and a web of intrigue.
This summer will be the most twisted Darkly game of all.
17-year-old Arcadia ‘Dia’ Gannon knows that she’s the school weirdo. Her mum, Gigi, owns an antiques shop in Eminence, Missouri but it’s Dia who keeps it going. Not only does she look after Agatha and Basil (the elderly assistants who are supposed to help run the shop) but she also tries to rein in her mum’s wilder purchases and inappropriate relationships. Dia dresses like someone from the 1920s and the closest she’s ever come to a relationship is when she snogged Choke Newington in the stairwell at school even though he immediately pretended that it never happened and later asked out the impossibly attractive Hailee.
One of the only cool things in Dia’s life is her love of Darkly games. Created by the legendary Louisiana Veda, 13 games were mass produced for the public while she was alive and another 15 discovered after her tragic death in 1985. Darkly games have a cult following, heralded for their imagination and the way they both draw players in and leave them completely terrified. Original versions very rarely come up for sale and when they do, they sell for millions of pounds.
Now the Louisiana Veda Foundation is seeking applications for its first ever summer internship programme in England. 7 individuals will each be be paid £2000 per week. Every Darkly fan in the world applies for a position, but Dia is amazed when hers is successful, making her one of what the internet calls the Veda Seven along with Poe Valois III (the fiercely intelligent son of a ridiculously wealthy French family), Franz-Luc Hoffbinhauer (who is from Germany and whose mum is multiply divorced), Cooper Min (from Washington, USA, who wants to become a funeral director), Torin Kelly (from Ireland, who is adopted and wants more than ever to find her birth parents as she splits her time between a party loving mum and alcoholic father), Everleigh Aradóttir (from Iceland, who has taken the place of her Darkly-obsessed step-sister who died before learning she was successful), and Mouse Bonetti (from Nigeria).
Soon the Veda Seven are in London under the management of Nile Raiden from the prestigious Derringer Street Chambers, which administers the Louisiana Veda Foundation. Raiden explains the real purpose of the internship: on the night that Louisiana Veda held a party to celebrate the 15th anniversary of her company’s foundation at the private island where she lived and worked someone stole the only copy of a 29th game called Valkyrie. Despite her best efforts, Louisiana never found it before her death and Derringer Street Chambers had no luck.
Then 6 months ago. Derringer Chambers learnt that teenagers are playing Valkyrie and the first person rumoured to have won it - 15-year-old George Grenfell - has gone missing. The Veda Seven are tasked with finding out how and where Valkyrie is being played and finding George. If they do, then they will each get £1 million and exclusive ownership of a Darkly game, including the licensing and gaming rights to the same.
Living on Louisiana’s island, Dia and the other interns search for clues to try and break the mystery. But Dia soon realises that solving Valkyrie’s mystery means digging into Louisiana’s past and the very foundation of the Darkly games …
I struggled to buy into the premise of Marisha Pessl’s standalone YA thriller as very little about it actually makes sense. It’s further hampered by one-dimensional characterisation (I struggled to remember who was who in the Veda Seven), a rote love triangle between two equally blah male characters. What really threw me out was how little research Pessl had done on English law or geography, which irritated me throughout the whole book.
This book should have absolutely been up my street. I enjoy a good thriller and was really looking forward to reading one set in the world of board games. Pessl gives Dia a strong first person narrative voice and the way she sets out her backstory (including sketching her relationship with her mum) is well done. However I thought Pessl tried far too hard to make Dia “unique” with the clothes and lack of friends while I found her crush on Choke was predictable rather than believable.
The immediate issue I had though was that I simply didn’t believe in the premise of Louisiana Veda’s legendary games having such a cult following. This is partly because Pessl can’t decide if they’re a niche cult, a luxury obsession or a form of mass entertainment, which means that there’s a lack of consistency in terms of their public recognition. This is an issue when Pessl tries to establish it as an underground activity that only teenagers are doing because the amount of work and people involved in it made me wonder how anyone was having trouble tracking down the people behind it.
The bigger issue for me though is that Pessl clearly hasn’t done much research on how the English legal profession works or what our geography is. Specifically she uses terms that simply don’t exist (Nile Raiden is a “senior barrister” - something that does not exist), confuses barristers with solicitors (the work that Derringer Chambers does is actually work that a solicitor’s firm would do) and then has them engage Choke as a legal intern (something that barristers’ chambers don’t typically do). I get that most teenage readers won’t understand this, but unfortunately this is my wheelhouse and it’s not difficult to find out how it works so when it isn’t accurate, it throws me out. Similarly Pessl has the Veda Seven living on an island in the North Sea, but apparently they can just drive into and out of London in an hour or so and apparently only need a few hours to sail to the Atlantic.
The characterisation of the Veda Seven is poor. Only Poe has any kind of development and it’s all predictable and Dia’s attraction to him doesn’t seem to rise beyond the fact that he’s rich and arrogant. Pessl puts in the obligatory YA love triangle with the equally under-characterised Choke and it’s as predictable and lacking in chemistry as you would expect.
I know that I am being hard on the book and I should say that there are some interesting ideas here notably in the way that Pessl links the development and objectives of Valkyrie to Louisiana’s backstory. There are equally moments in the game itself that are genuinely unnerving and I did enjoy watching Dia working out some of the twists and turns, even though some of it is more luck than intelligence. I equally thought that the message in the ending was an interesting one, albeit one that I really wished had been developed more as a theme in the main storyline.
Ultimately, though there was just more that I disliked about this book than I could find to enjoy and as such, I can’t say that I would rush to read Pessl’s other books on the strength of it.
The Verdict:
I struggled to buy into the premise of Marisha Pessl’s standalone YA thriller as very little about it actually makes sense. It’s further hampered by one-dimensional characterisation (I struggled to remember who was who in the Veda Seven), a rote love triangle between two equally blah male characters. What really threw me out was how little research Pessl had done on English law or geography, which irritated me throughout the whole book.
DARKLY was released in the United Kingdom on 28th November 2024. Thanks to Walker Books for the review copy of this book.
