In Darkness, Shadows Breathe

I received an e-book ARC of In Darkness, Shadows Breathe, authored by Catherine Cavendish, from NetGalley and the publisher Flame Tree Press in return for honest review, which follows below. I thank both for this opportunity. I rated this novel 3 stars. There was much about this that felt timeless, including the author’s voice. I set the main time period much older in my mind, then had to adjust quite guiltily when a cell phone is used in chapter two. Without a year to ground me, I was swept up with the expressive language, imagining the entirety of the novel taking place in centuries past. I think it helped with the feeling of upheaval when there were actual jumps in time for the characters, for the reader’s POV. Hospitals harboring darker pasts; built from sanitariums that barely attempted basic patient care, while physicians experimented on the vulnerable and involuntarily committed: Gothic dreams are made of these, who am I to disagree? I worked at a hospital that was a few years shy of reaching its centennial year, and let me tell ya, that place had a presence. Places like that, they creep, they grow in strange ways. It can start with an extra floor, an under street tunnel connecting out patient surgery to the main building that runs several blocks but never lights properly, but the more that is built, the more lost you can feel traveling the halls. I worked with that hospital system for ten years, I didn’t realize how many odd things, supernatural even, were common place at that location until we moved to a newly built, clean slate complex a few years later. I felt such unexpected nostalgia. Every reader experiences a book their own way, for me most of this novel was enjoyable, creepy in some places; but there were a few things that I wish were different. The first half of the novel seemed short of information for the protagonists, while the second half had people popping up left and right to add tidbits to the growing facts collected by our heroine. I also thought there was a character introduced that would have worked better in the story by either being more present or reduced to no interaction. It felt incomplete. That being said, obviously I am only one reader, other readers not required or expected to feel the same.