In Walk the Darkness Down, Daniel Magariel (One of the Boys) introduces a couple separately torturing themselves through grief and eventually coming together again.
Marlene and Les, who live in a small, troubled town on the Atlantic coast of the United States, lost their young daughter years ago. In their suffering, they mistreat each other. Les is a commercial fisherman on an offshore scalloping boat; punishingly hard physical labor, camaraderie with the men of his crew, and violence combine in a cocktail that helps distract him from his loss. Marlene drives the streets at night, mining memory, searching for the deep and searing pain that will help her remember. During his brief stays at their apartment, they repeat a pattern: Marlene breaks the bedroom door and Les fixes it. When Les is offshore, she picks up local sex workers and brings them home to clean them up and feed them. One of these encounters develops into something resembling friendship, just as Les's crew fractures and the dangers of his work increase. As their two lives approach new crises, Marlene and Les must chart a course out of self-destruction.
Magariel's prose is as quietly lovely and evocative as his subjects are bleak: "The woman settles into her chair, and Marlene proceeds to lay bare the details of her face. The worry lines of her forehead Marlene excavates with a pass over the brow." Stark and tragic, Walk the Darkness Down offers a harrowing view of individual and familial suffering--with empathy and, ultimately, with hope. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia