Certain Dark Things

Silvia Moreno-Garcia has shown through this book that she can worldbuild with the best of them. A re-evaluation of global vampire mythos incorporating various creatures from different cultures? Awesome. A modern neo-noir that doesn't fall into the usual Orientalist, cyberpunk trappings? Amazing. Deep-rooted lore that holds up character interactions like the foundation of a massive city-state? Perfection. The actual story itself? Honestly, it doesn't hold a candle to the kind of worldbuilding Moreno-Garcia established.

What felt like 200 pages of character study/commentary on Imperialism was suddenly thrown to a hasty, bloody end in the last 40 or so pages. To some degree, it makes sense. Once the bullets start flying, there's no more show more room for growth, just ducking and returning fire. At some point, the volatile powder keg of the different factions vying for control had to explode, and explode it did. Much like Rogue One, the third act was action-packed and could easily have been it's own self-contained story. Unfortunately, it felt like something completely separate from the rest of the work.

Overall, I give the book 4 stars, and would absolutely love to see more stories from this world. show less

Certain Dark Things takes different vampire mythologies from many different culture to create a fascinating world in this neo-noir horror novel. Atl comes from a line of bird-women blood drinkers with origins in the Aztec Empire. When another vampire clan kills her family, she runs to Mexico City, a place where vampires are not welcome. Atl allies herself with Domingo, a garbage collector whose loyalty makes Atl think twice about killing him. With the enemy vampire clan, cops, and an anti-vampire group all after her, Atl and Domingo race to get out of the city alive. Silvia-Moreno’s story delivers complicated characters, a refreshing mythology, cinematic writing, and a setting that comes alive on the page.

*Thanks to Netgalley and the show more publisher for a copy in exchange for an honest review. show less

A whip smart, fast paced, urban fantasy that takes vampire lore to an entirely new level, CERTAIN DARK THINGS by Sylvia Moreno-Garcia is the debut offering from @torbooks new horror imprint, Nightfire, and it is a perfect book to launch with. Reading almost as much as an alternate history as it does urban fantasy/horror, vampires are discovered in the 1960s to actually exist. As the world struggles with this new knowledge, vampires and humans attempt to coexist, but of course this doesn’t work out. CDT takes place in a near-future Mexico City, one of the few vampire-free zones in the world. Told from multiple points of view, CDT follows young, naïve Atl, a vampire of Aztec decent, who is on the run after her family is murdered by a show more rival vampire cartel. She befriends street kid Domingo, who can help her navigate the unfamiliar streets of Mexico City as she tries to negotiate them passage out of North America before either the Mexico City police, the human mafia, or the rival vampire family finds her and kills her.

The way Moreno-Garcia creates such complex lore around each of the different types of vampires is fantastic. You won’t find sparkling vampires here, nor vampires that can change into mist. Instead, these are vampires grounded in the real world, with various subspecies and a history and lore to go with each. While being dark and gritty and bloody, it’s still refreshing to see a writer be able to do something original like this with vampires. Moreno-Garcia’s writing is slick and stylish; I’m sorry I haven’t read any of her other books yet. I’ll need to remedy that sooner than later. show less

I couldn't resist picking this book up at the con bookstore at ConFusion. I don't read a lot of vampire books, or really noir of any sort, but I have faith in Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and was interested in the Mexico City setting and Aztec influences.

I loved this even more than I expected. I tend to get very justice-fixated on any creatures/characters who have to harm others to survive, but I was invested in Atl right away. I loved the richness of the world-building -- the different sorts of vampires and their factions and grudges. With a whole encyclopedia of their origins in the back!

I really need to read more by Silvia Moreno-Garcia already. The balance of action/reflection, the texture of the world, the pacing are all so good.

I enjoyed this book, which surprised me because usually I find vampires tedious. The author introduces her own creative vampire mythology, including my new favorite subspecies the Revenants who do not even bother with messy blood--they utilize a clean, efficient, and terrifying method of directly sucking the life force out of their victims. I also liked how the story of vampires in (an alternate reality) Mexico City echoes Spanish colonialism as well as recent narco drug dealing gangs. Recommended for all readers, even reluctant vampire readers like myself.

Certain Dark Things by Silvia Moreno-Garcia is an awesome work of horror, that takes familiar tropes and reimagines them. The concept is Certain Dark Things envisions a fascinating near future Mexico City with different types of vampire drug lords vying for territory. The story takes off when Domingo, a lonely garbage-collecting street kid, comes into the orbit of Atl, the descendant of Aztex blood drinkers, who is a smart, beautiful, dangerous vampire. Atl needs to escape the rival narco-vampire clan, and Domingo needs to get off the streets. They both decide they'll head for South America. So, the two team up, with Domingo becoming Atl's renfield (vampire companion) and even lovers, in attempt to escape the vampires, humans, cops, and show more criminals that are after Atl. What occurs next throughout the novel is a pulse-pounding chase through a neon-drenched, Blade Runner-esque Mexican City, that will keep you turning the pages.

Certain Dark Things is a wonderful, bloody, gritty vampire noir that reimagines vampire lore. I happy the Tor Nightfire decided to reprint this book. It's original, complex, and entertaining. You'll quickly become fascinated by the vampire lore that not only draws on European culture but Mexican culture as well. The characters are complex (for instance, Atl isn't particularly a good person - I mean she is a vampire after all - and Domingo still chooses to be her renfield), the setting is unique, and the dialogue in this novel packs a wallop (you can clearly see the influence of film noir in the dialogue).

I really liked Mexican Gothic, thought The Daughter of Doctor Moreau wasn't bad (was actually pretty good!), but this novel is just one of the best books I've read in a long time. show less

This is an interesting one.
It is a vampire story, but it feels original and unique among the thousands of generic urban fantasy stories.
In some regards, the vampires are very different than the common clichées, but that is not what makes this feel so different.

This book expertly handles POV in a very satisfying way. I never felt overwhelmed by how many characters I was supposed to learn about and empathize with. The POV is used to switch to the most interesting events and not away from them. I wasn't annoyed by a change of viewpoint even a single time which is usually my biggest gripe with multiple POVs.

The world feels much larger than the stage on which the story happens. The book manages to give the impression of a complex living show more world in which things keep happening without the characters being present.
And the world feels gritty. It manages to convey a visceral atmosphere where bad things can and will happen.
Many of the characters feel multi-layered with internal conflicts that don't fit neatly on a good and evil scale.

So why only 3 stars then?

Let's get to the biggest weakness of this book. Physical interactions between characters.
A lot of them just don't make sense. Especially in the latter half of the book, it becomes increasingly obvious how strange and disjointed many interactions are.
Let me give you an example from the end of the book. One character holds onto the arm of another tightly and claims that to make him release his grip the other person will have to break his arm.
She pushes him, and he falls and sprawls on the floor while she is unaffected. Like, why the whole shebang about him not letting go? Didn't he have a tight grip on her? This one example might seem rather petty but these kinds of contradictions happen all the time when characters interact. It seems the author is not able to actually visualize the scenes she is writing and play through them in her head. This is especially noticeable in fighting scenes. Most of them are honestly terrible at least from a choreographic standpoint. Interactions between characters that are currently trying to kill each other are strangely choppy and really make no sense whatsoever. This goes along with the classic character being completely exhausted and severely injured, about to die, and then pulling yet another burst of energy out of their ass to execute some incredibly far-fetched move befitting a martial arts movie. But worse than that, after these sequences, the character, that was about to die from blood loss for example is suddenly fine again, ready for another round. This is especially strange because the rest of the writing stays very high quality which I found incredibly jarring. I almost wish the fights were just all-around terrible so I could just skim over them and enjoy the rest of the story.
But as I previously wrote, this inability of writing sensible physical interactions between characters is present everywhere in the story, not only the fights.

My second big gripe with this book is how it starts out with this dark nuanced take on vampires that have done terrible things as that is in their nature and whatnot. It almost reminded me a bit of the feeling I got reading "Interview with the Vampire", how the book told a terrible story about all-around horrible characters that nonetheless manage to capture you emotionally in some strange way.
It also makes the story feel darker and grittier and gives the characters apparent depth.
But there are two problems with this. First, these characters are not centuries-old creatures that have lived through many lifetimes. They are in their early twenties.
The second problem is the emotional landscape of the protagonists, the vampire in particular.
The characters paradoxically degenerate from cynical, world-weary survivors that have seen too much of the world's cruelties far too early in life into innocent, idealistic, gullible, wide-eyed adolescents, and in the process, they also become dumber instead of smarter.

The book started out as a gritty story about survival and politics and war among vampires which then devolves into this cheesy teenage romance of a beggar boy and a vampire princess or something like that.
What is even stranger is that the book doesn't really lose its dark and gritty environment. People are just killed without much fanfare sometimes. Deaths without long death scenes feel infinitely more impactful than these drawn-out affairs of exchanging last words and expressions of grief and desperation, to me at least.
And the author demonstrates that she hasn't forgotten this either.

I guess you could say this is a book of contradictions. Full of genius writing mixed with utter terribleness. show less