Darkly by Marisha Pessl

You know how sometimes you have an author whose first work you encountered was so life-altering that you’re down for whatever they write after, no matter the quality of the subsequent output? Marisha Pessl is one of those authors for me.

I fell in love hard with Special Topics In Calamity Physics, which was a brilliant look at a young girl leading a peripatetic life in the wake of her mercurial professor father, trying to fit in at a new high school during senior year and stumbling into a murder investigation in the process. Ms Pessl’s next two books, Night Film and Neverworld Wake, were both fine. Night Film was very self-consciously adult (and commensurately ponderous) and Neverworld Wake felt like a capitulation to the marketing schisms that demanded that any novel with a teenage protagonist had to be classified as Young Adult. Darkly, at least, feels more comfortable as a YA novel, tho perhaps I have just adjusted my expectations downwards in regard to this author.

Gosh, this review isn’t meant to be bitchy, I just want eccentric, brilliant books closer to STiCP than to your average YA mystery, and I’m starting to get a little impatient!

Anyway, Darkly tells the tale of Dia Gannon, a teenage outcast who essentially runs the antique store ostensibly staffed by her flighty mother and the elderly assistants who might as well be related to her by blood. When she learns that the estate of legendary game-maker Louisiana Veda is holding a worldwide search for interns, she’s desperate to go but also scared of leaving her little family behind.

Like millions of others worldwide, Dia has played several of the immersive and haunting board/mystery games Louisiana published via her company, Darkly Games. Beautiful, secretive Louisiana reportedly perished herself years ago. Now, seven teenagers are being invited to visit Darkly Games for the first time. Dia doesn’t expect to be selected, but nothing will stop her from going once she is.

The internship is nothing like she expects, tho. As she and her fellow interns unravel the mystery of why they’ve been brought there, they find themselves playing in a terrifying and all-too-realistic game. Could this be Louisiana’s final masterpiece? Dia might be able to find out, so long as she survives the ordeal.

I loved the foundational conceit of this novel, even if I as a game-maker and puzzle-enthusiast have to reluctantly admit that Louisiana’s rags-to-riches story is very much a conceit. I WISH that it were possible for creators of intricate physical (and even immersive real-life) games to rake in the big bucks like Louisiana did, but I’m happy enough to go along with the idea that she earned enough to buy an estate and a mysterious factory and to be able to hand out largesse essentially at whim.

What I did really love were the game descriptions! I’m still not 100% sure why the person who set Valkyrie in motion did so since it was clearly counterproductive to their aims, but I really enjoyed reading about the game play and puzzling my way through it with Dia. Motive aside, the setup for Valkyrie made sense, as did the many secrets of Louisiana’s life. Dia and her family were also winsome, and while some of her fellow teens felt barely fleshed out, it was nice to have a diverse cast rocketing around the world, solving mysteries.

This book really made me want to go play some of the bazillion escape/puzzle games I already own. After all, I can’t buy more if I haven’t played the ones I already have! (or so I tell myself, lol) And I’d love to help make some of these wonderfully creative — tho hopefully less tortured than Louisiana — game designers I admire that much richer, if only so I can have more of their delightful creations to play. It’s a virtuous cycle, rather like the one depicted in these pages.

Darkly by Marisha Pessl was published November 26 2024 by Delacorte Press and is available from all good booksellers, including