Book Review: Midnight Is The Darkest Hour by Ashley Winstead

Ruth Cornier nurses a rebellious heart beneath her placid exterior as a good preacher’s daughter. Growing up restricted and practically friendless in Bottom Springs, Louisiana, she sought escape in books, occasionally snagging a contraband novel despite her father’s efforts to cleanse the local libraries of “sinful” titles. When she’s fourteen, she discovers Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series. In its pages she reads about the kind of love she’d never imagined, prompting her to open her heart eagerly to novelty and danger in the cause of romance.

This, alas, has the unfortunate consequence of putting her in the path of newcomer Renard Michaels only three years later. Inexperienced with men, she willingly goes along with his suggestions until they turn into a nightmare. Her classmate and fellow outcast Everett Duncan rescues her, forging a bond that only grows stronger as they grow older. They make an unlikely pairing – she the town librarian, he the tearaway unironically called the Devil’s son – but their connection is undeniable, even when he finally disappears one heartbreaking summer that has Ruth prostrate with grief at the thought of having lost his friendship.

At twenty-four, Ruth figures it’s time to move on. But then a trapper dredges up the skull of a murdered man from the swamp, setting the entire town ablaze with fear. The townsfolk naturally turn to Ruth’s father for comfort:

This is Southern Baptist country, and people are prone to unease, apocalyptic and overly associative, seeing holy warnings in the smallest of things, like the pattern sugar makes when spilled across a counter. My father is where you’d expect him, in the middle of the crowd, the tallest person here, thick, tanned, and already gleaming in his cuffed white dress shirt. As the sheriff speaks, the hands of the townsfolk find my father, until he looks like a massive sun radiating spokes of people. They lay their palms on his shoulders and forearms as if he is an anchor, his holiness a shield to protect them from the coming news. I cannot recall ever touching or being touched by my father that gently.

As terrified as she is that her guilty secret will be exposed as the investigation into the skull continues, Ruth can’t help but feel relieved, if not ecstatic, at Everett’s sudden return in the wake of the discovery. After all, he had just as much to do with the skull in the swamp as she did. He, however, is less thrilled to learn that in his absence, she’s begun a romantic relationship with a sheriff’s deputy, a relationship that just so happens to have been rubber stamped by her religious parents. Ruth argues that her romance with Barry is the perfect way for her to get behind the scenes information about the on-going police case. Besides, she and Everett are just friends, aren’t they? But as the best friends scheme to keep their involvement with the skull a secret, they realize that the many feelings they’ve tried to hide over the years just won’t stay buried.

I’m not sure whether I would have reacted so viscerally to this novel were I not in a very sympathetic frame of mind to Ruth’s at the time of reading it, but I do know that that ending was one of the best pieces of writing and meta-commentary I’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing as a thriller reader. Ashley Winstead imbues what could be just a very fun, surface-level contemporary Southern Gothic with both thoughtfulness and poignancy, inserting a surprisingly essential postmodern dialog with the reader into a heartstopping narrative of desire and belief. She dissects why people make fun of teenage girls and their interests in such a way that even a Twilight-skeptic like myself is convinced to give the property a second thought, with passages like these where Ruth muses on the appeal:

This all-encompassing love for all the wrong men–what’s in it for you? The truth was, I longed to kiss people like Edward Cullen, vampires and heartbreakers who could hurt me, kill me, men who walked the knife’s edge of life, because what I really wanted–what I’d wanted from fourteen, even before I had the language to describe it–was to suck the marrow out of them and carry it myself. Forget puberty, forget growing up into a woman. I wanted to drink their threat, hold that volatile substance in my chest. Swallow their danger and become the danger myself. Vampire, viper; all that power, mine.

Teenage girls are one of society’s easiest targets for mockery. Ms Winstead argues that this is because of the way people would rather banish and ridicule their own softest feelings rather than admit to caring and hurting and being weak. It’s a shockingly strong thesis on which to build a gripping work of Southern noir that grapples, thoughtfully and profoundly, with questions of justice and morality and love. I adored Midnight Is The Darkest Hour, even as it broke my heart.