It is a masterpiece of darkness.
585872
Wow! You ever watch a movie and when it's over, you feel the need to watch something funny or wholesome to get the visuals that plaque your mind from the previous movie? Well, that is what Deliverance for Amelia did. This is one gripping; intense and emotionally dark read that I was unable and unwilling to put down. So much so I finished in one sitting. Gabriel is one of the most sadistic "creatures" I have ever read about. There is not a single solitary quality about him that is endearing or likable.  I thank the author for NOT taking the amazing character, that was Gabriel, and turning him into the fantasy of a "changed" man. This is what I truly loved and commend the author for.  I thank her for staying true to who he was as a character and following through with an ending that surpassed my expectations.  With each page turned, I found myself being further pulled into the riveting story going deeper and deeper into the minds and lives of the characters. The author wrote with such visual accuracy that I felt as if I were there and part of the story. If you are looking for a read that is full of dark and twisted elements, a read that will stay with you long after the last page, a read that is a walk on the darker side of life and love, then this is just the book for you. It is a masterpiece of darkness. I'm glad I read it and look forward to reading more from the author. Just be sure to heed the warning of the book, it's there for a reason!
2809196
It is often dificult to express emotions, especially those that choke our words in tears or heartache. However, Havoc and crew have beautifully expressed that which grasps at the pith of human understanding and sang the sorrow that haunts every one of us. Here, songs range from the punk style of Black Sails on the Sunset to the more melodic style of Art of Drowning. I think that the current hardcore trend is also embodied in this musically engineered masterpiece. the poetry of the lyrics is riveting and if the music cannot inspire you, the revealing words of raw emotion will. How does darkness feel now that she has been captured?
393168
This series explain the dark nature of human kind, and show his revelation...
There is no exist and will never be exist a show like this. With this deep, this beauty mixed with terror and grue, but the art combination make the all glory of this master piece of the genius Chris Carter.
The best show ever.
Thanks FOX
1432234
Actually, there's a lot of skill here weaving a tale that keeps you turning pages. It's definitely dark and I won't call it a fun read.  It is very dark fatalistic noir.  It's about bad choices that get the lead character deeper and deeperWe have here the type of character Robert Mitchum did so well back in the 40's.  This is a great read and one which you8 will not soon forget.
383331
This book surprised the heck out of me. It is a superb and sensitive account of some of the grimmest events I've encountered in literature. It executes them at a high-gear intensity while still taking its time to allow you to enjoy the hideous scenery. It is also depressingly realistic.

In short, it's a true literary accomplishment. I rank it up there with some favorites of mine like Bastard Out of Carolina and The Bayou Trilogy. If dark, rural writing is your thing, pick this up. It's a fierce monster of a book.
1593482
Screw the book this masterpiece stands high on it's own very great merits...BUNUEL would be proud, do not dismiss this genius GOTHIC movie...terrifying with a bit of COCTEAU quality imagery, BEAUTIFUL. RELIGIOUS CRIME ART, best film of recent memory(Dal Lazlo...crime art expert).
688311
Let me begin by saying this is the kind of plot line that would never entice me to buy a book.  It came highly recommended from a trusted source, so I bought it.  It is dark, as others have said, and it is disturbing as others have also said, but it is nearly impossible to put down or stop thinking about its themes.  Whatever its shortcomings, and there are a few, there are elements (including the absence of a specific time period context) that add to the overall theme of the potential and limits of deliberate ignorance and isolation, no matter how acquisition of knowledge is forcibly limited by ritual, rules, and force.  It will make you think about many issues of family, community, and captivity.  This is not a book I would give a younger reader.
4480561
Profound human love and the most repugnant savagery, horror and redemption, a heroine and a grotesque revenger, two families with dark secrets, two cities, all in the backdrop of the bloodbath that was the French Revelation. In reading it, be prepared for the "Best of Times and the Worst of Times."

Like all great stories, the brilliance of this tale is its ability to not only intimately draw us into the tangled lives of these characters, battered by the historical tyrannies of their time, but to use their story as a parable to understand the human narrative as a whole. Perhaps this is why Dickens believed this book to be his best book; perhaps he felt like it was his clearest statement of what he believed.

The struggles of a small family open the reader's eyes to understanding the larger struggles of humanity in general. We learn not only about the turmoil and violence plaguing France at the time of the French Revolution, but the sin and darkness plaguing our human race. Through this story, we understand principles which will prove true for all times and all places. Dickens writes that the evil cruelty of the French aristocracy gave birth to something according to its kind, the French Revolution, as all things since beginning of creation have produced according to their kind. Evil begets more evil. This is the story of humanity.

But redemption and resurrection echo throughout the novel as well. Darnay had a mother, who, though an aristocrat, once sought to make restitution for the something incredibly cruel her heartless husband had done. This woman is mentioned only once briefly in the whole book, but her influence on her son Charles Darnay profoundly changed the course of Darnay's life and the whole book.

Even Dickens' style of writing is a reflection on the truth of real life. For instance, every single scene in the book is important to the story, although for the first half of the book, the reader can't figure out how it will come together. But at the end, as everything is revealed, the reader can think back and see the purpose for each scene. Similarly, as we walk through life, we rarely understand the purpose for the various scenes we find ourselves in. Although we will never understand completely until heaven, there are times when it is all brought together and we see the purposes behind puzzling circumstances.

In typical Dickens style, this book is written to tug at your heart strings. But this is not done in a manipulative or sentimental way, but in the most straightforward way possible: by giving an often newspaper-sounding account of the events that take place in each scene. Yet any reader with a pulse will be profoundly moved in numerous scenes. How does he do this? By focusing his accounts on the human element, the true purpose behind any story. Woven through every page in this book is the message that every human being counts. Collectivism, sacrificing the individual for the group, is shown to be barbaric.

Another stroke of genius is Dickens uncanny way of portraying evil. Madame DeFarge becomes in the book everything that she hates. The reason she got to be the way she is, was because of something terrible that was done to her sister and brother by the aristocracy when she was still young. And yet, at the end of the novel, it is said of her that as she puts men and women to death, she cares nothing that they may be innocent, or that they may leave behind a bereft sister or brother or wife. She only cares that more and more people die, and she is never satisfied.

In a pre-Flannery O'Connor style, Dickens leaves the reader no room for false hopes in the goodness of humanity. He wants to take your false hopes and hit them out of the ballpark never to be seen again. If there's one thing that this story was supposed to shatter, it is the myth that man is getting better and better, and the solutions to his sin is minor. Redemption is possible, but the price is higher than any of us imagined.
2123567
What a rich and diverse tapestry is S. P. Somtow's Darker Angels, a dark novel of the Civil War that's told as a phantasmagorical series of stories within stories like concentric rings. There's really no way to do justice to its structure in this brief description, but it must be said that such a potentially intrusive device here causes no confusion and indeed takes nothing away from the desperately grim beauty of the words that make up each and every narration.

From the strange beginning, in which the recently widowed Mrs. Paula Grainger meets Walt Whitman while clandestinely visiting the body of the just-slain Abraham Lincoln, to the whirling, wild, wonderful stories of the war later told by Whitman and his young friend, Zachary Brown, and then the stories told by those within the stories ... about the elderly voodoo prince, Old Joseph, who as a free slave raises black Union soldiers from the dead for one last skirmish, and the boy preacher who may have killed his own father, Jimmie Lee Cox, and Tyler Tyler, the young soldier with no arms, and bewitching Phoebe, the voodoo priestess who holds the power to transform herself into a black panther, and finally re(folding) back onto the Reverend Grainger--whose correspondents include Edgar Allan Poe, Lord Byron, and the President himself, and who is not at all quite the way his wife thinks him to be.

This is a novel of transformation, of being, of death, and of living the true life that only the grimness of death can bring. It's a novel less about the Civil War than about all wars, but it is quite specifically a Civil War novel, in which the richness of the themes runs like blood spilled between brothers and comrades, masters and slaves. This novel is grotesque, yet it makes such wise statements about the grotesqueness of war and slavery and religion that its own gruesomeness seems not only natural but necessary. Composer and film-maker S. P. Somtow weaves together so many disparate narrative voices yet produces a single cloth of intense beauty and rage, in which inhumanity vies with love as the fiercest of emotions. A novel such as Darker Angels cannot easily be described--it has to be experienced. It's a mystery to me that this great work of literature--yes, literature--will slip between the cracks because of its macabre subject matter. Perhaps too many critical voices need to stop paying attention to labels and focus instead on the heady work beneath this attractive cover. If you missed the first printing, by all means treat yourself to a special order--this trade paperback edition will fit easily on the shelf next to the Poe, Whitman, and Byron to which it so intriguingly refers. A true masterpiece of historical fiction, Darker Angels sings with a grim joy rarely achieved by novelists who dare touch subjects such as these.

Review originally in Chizine

--W.D. Gagliani, author of Wolf's Edge
611670
Super dark and difficult to watch, but the acting is spot on and the story is timely and one that many people could identify with. Not sure that I would ever recommend this to a friend, but I think many people would benefit from seeing it to understand the situation from multiple viewpoints.
98964
Understand, this is not an expansion for you and your friends to sit down  and play after watching Monty Python.  In the darkest game of the World of  Darkness, Shoah is the darkest corner.  The opening artwork is a brutal  example of what you'll find in the rest of the book: if it's too much for  you, then you may not want to get  any deeper.
Shoah: Charnel Houses of  Europe opens with a brief bit of history (prompting some to even go so far  as to use this section as a textbook) before detailing the Dark Kingdom of  Wire: the Holocaust's wraithly inheritors.  The book presents the falsified  Jewish society that detoured a Red Cross investigation (which, in turn,  kept the world blind just long enough for a few million more deaths), the  Polish ghettos of Warsaw and their almost-victorious hero, and a Russian  camp.  These are, obviously, in descending order of darkness, but each are  richly detailed and usable for any who think their troupe can handle the  content.
Auschwitz is last. It is detailed.  It is thorough.  If you  decide your troupe should go to Auschwitz, it contains enough information  to horrify the players: that this is the worst atrocity in human  history.
The book is dark, troubling, nightmarish, and easily worth three  thousand times the cover price for any roleplayer who knows what it  contains.  It is very simply the best RPG book I've ever read.
3189977
The story starts ominously in one place, pivots to another, spins back in time, and then back again, leaving you a little dizzy but still certain youll find your feet, but thats only so it can ruthlessly backhand you into darkness, despair, anguish so terrible you might wonder what the devil is wrong with the author but you're never given a chance to break the spell because this is dark, dark magic that will make you cry for respite. I am NOT exaggerating. Im going to need a fifth of whiskey and a bottle of pills to recover from this book.
3333215
The horror that was the Stalinist Great Terror have never been captured with such emotion, tragedy, and...darkness. The brilliance of this novel lies in that fact that it is able to make strong intellectual statements while showing the moral failure of a whole world. Emotion and philosophy come togeather in a way that is unsurpassed. What scholars have come to understand about the Great Terror in recent years is that we cannot understand why it happened by studying history. One must ask philosophical and moral questions to understand this destruction of an enitre universe. Beats 1984, Anthem, and Brave New World all to hell...
890924
Film noir doesn't get any darker or more sophisticated than this frightening look at male rage and isolation. One of the treasures of the genre and of American film. Every time I see it, I come away freshly agitated, with a headful of new questions. Ray hit his highest note with this film and so did Bogart. An amazing achievement.
3995811
This is a 22 year old film.  I am hardly capable of reviewing it, as it has been done so many times by others.  But it is one of the most beautiful films I have ever seen.  The massacre scene in the vale is even like a ballet, which sounds odd I know.  The music has haunted me for years.  And as an historian, it is spot-on perfect in costume and battle scene. IMBD gives it less than a 10.  People are idiots.
3882341
It's nearly perfect and about eight times more intense than any horror/thriller. I recommend it without reservation but you should brace yourself.
2008621
This is a masterpiece. You can feel that there's a half-hour hard thinking behind every sentence.