Reviewed by Elizabetta
TITLE: In Such Dark Places
AUTHOR: Joseph Caldwell
PUBLISHER: Open Road Media (republished)
LENGTH: 229 pages
BLURB: When a photographer witnesses a violent crime in New York’s Lower East Side, he hunts down the missing camera that may hold answers
Eugene is a midwesterner living in New York, an erstwhile Catholic and not-quite-openly-gay photographer. When a Holy Week pageant in the gritty Lower East Side erupts into a riot, he is sucked into the city’s shadowy depths. While photographing the parade, Eugene has his eye on a handsome teen, but when things turn violent the youth is stabbed and Eugene’s camera is stolen. To find the camera and its precious film, which may provide evidence, Eugene has to become acquainted with a seedy, unfamiliar world, and hold on to his sanity in the process. In Such Dark Places is a thrilling debut novel of awakening and obsession.
REVIEW:
Eugene is an interesting kinda guy… He wanders through this story like a ghost, an observer on the edges of the action. And he has things happen to him more than he instigates, yet he is the center around which the action swirls.
Eugene is a camera man, a photographer. He eavesdrops on the world through his lens, prurient, a peeper in the open. Just how good he is at the craft is not clear. He seems to know how to get the shot, how to develop the black and whites in his bathroom darkroom. But he’s looking for that career-making series of photos. Something that will pull him out of the going-nowhere, part-time movers job that he depends on.
Eugene attends a Holy Week parade in a New York City slum neighborhood hoping to get some compelling shots of the common folk in their natural setting… ever looking for that gallery exhibition. The neighborhood is unfamiliar to Eugene, very ethnic, very colorful. And the parade, enacting the passion of Christ’s last hours, gives the possibility of passions flying amongst the players… Jesus toils down the parade path, under the cross, but it’s the rope-whip wielding Roman soldiers in papier-mâché armor, who catch Eugene’s focus. Hunky, all-male and oozing alpha pheromones, Eugene picks up the scent, camera snapping away. Inconceivably, a fist fight breaks out. Pandemonium ensues, and murder results. Eugene loses his camera which may hold evidence of the crime, and the rest of the story is his working to find it. And himself.
We learn a little about Eugene… it’s doled out piecemeal. I’m guessing he’s youngish… trying to start that career… just moved to the Big Apple from Hicksville, excited by the possibilities…
“Real live human degradation, big-city style, was foreign to him still and the opportunity to see it first hand excited him.”
He hides in the shadows, the dark places. He’s a lapsed Catholic at odds with his faith because of his sexuality…
“… the man put the palms of both hands on Eugene’s shoulders and, with a pressure that was firm… forced him down onto his knees in front of him… somewhere around this time, Eugene stopped going to Mass… out of perplexity. He no longer had any sense of where he stood among men and God…”
Yet he is drawn to the Good Friday parade, and we get a story about the intersection of formal religion and homosexuality. At the crux is Eugene’s struggle with his place in society and his sexual identity. A young boy, David, keeps bumping into and up against Eugene like a boisterous puppy, begging for his attention. Could David be his salvation or his downfall?
I had to struggle through this story. Not because of the writing. It is very well written; the author is an established playwright, which can be felt in the style. The premise and character are also both interesting. I just found it very dark, depressing, with a good share of violence threaded throughout. To borrow from someone else… I appreciated it more than I enjoyed it.
“… it occurred to Eugene that if his cares were to be stripped from him… he would be left… with only a naked despair.”
“His panic increased. The priest had the power to take his sexuality away.”
There is a lot of fear, guilt, and hiding surrounding Eugene. He’s not always a nice guy. Morally, he is all over the place: ashamed one minute, plagued with lecherous thoughts the next; his sexual attention jumps freely from one guy to the next as he lays his plans indiscriminately, one minute he’s saddened by a youth’s murder, the next, he’s sniffing after one of the suspects. Eugene didn’t really resonate with me, I couldn’t completely empathize with him.
In Such Dark Places was written in the 70’s and there is a dated, historical feel to it though there are issues that translate directly to the 21st century. We’re still stuck in dark places… The reminder that we have come a long way but still have so much farther to go hits home.
Not a romance, nor erotica, I’d file this on the gay literature shelf, it definitely belongs there.
Elizabetta rates it: 
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