In the dusky shadows of 1980’s North Carolina, Andrew L Clark conjures a novel both haunted and alive in Where Dark Things Rise (Quill & Crow Press, 2025. Two generations past the events of his earlier work, Where Dark Things Grow (Independently Published, August 2024), the world here is darker and more restless, peopled by adolescents who feel as though they’ve walked unwittingly into the margins of mythology. Sixteen-year-old Mina is one of them: burdened by family dysfunction, economic despair, and the specter of powers she neither wanted nor understands. Clark takes that fertile cusp of teenage ambition and anxiety and sets it festooned with folklore, horror, and the uneasy swirl of a coming-of-age story that refuses gentleness.
Where many novels might stop at the mystical, Clark moves beyond it: the horrors Mina faces are both literal (the shapeshifting preacher/wolf, the human trafficking ring), and atmospheric (the weight of poverty, the rigidity of fundamentalist belief, the simmering shame of feeling “less than” in a trailer-park world chasing ivy-green campuses). This duality of internal and external threats is the novel’s great strength. Mina is a stellar student, but because of her poverty, her teachers believe that she’ll never amount to anything. The country-club boys she attends high school with only want her for one thing, and that thing is not her brilliant mind.
Early in the novel, Mina attends a backwoods camp meeting led by Reverend Ezra, who can shapeshift into a wolf. What begins as a church service swells into frenzied music, convulsing parishioners, and shadows flickering where light should be. Reverend Ezra touts his church’s “Purity Sojourn,” an event where young people camp in an isolated area and are purified through his preaching. At the prior year’s sojourn, a young girl disappears and still has not been found:
“Ezra pictured the young girl, who’d had the face of a child, but the full soft shape of a woman. What had her name been? Ahh, yes, Heidi. He remembered the hint of mischief about the girl’s eyes, the deviousness he detected that most could not. It was far better that Heidi had disappeared than become an agent of sin in the world. As he thought of the girl, he could conjure the sweet smell of her skin.”
This scene, and the Purity Sojourn “rehabilitation camp” scene that follows later in the novel show how spiritual faith, when twisted into profane performance, distorts and weaponizes the Christian faith into an unrecognizable hypocrisy that Christ never preached nor intended. What masquerades as a Christian reform camp is perhaps the novel’s most horrifying setting, as Mina discovers what’s being done to the girl’s there, and how faith is used to justify cruelty. Here, Clark’s social critique is sharp, as these scenes are less about shadows and ghosts than about the power-systems that sanctify abuse.
Mina’s growing shadow-powers—she calls them “Shadow Faces”—mirror the way resentment and deep hurt can shape us. Clark positions power not as a pure gift, but as a burden: to wield power is to carry wounds, and to fight is to risk becoming the meanness you hate. The shapeshifting preacher/wolf is monstrous, but perhaps the true evil lurks in Mina’s normal-looking world of manipulation and exploitation. When her powers summon the Shadow Faces at an inopportune time as she’s making out with her romantic interest, Gabe—a young man who has intimate knowledge of supernatural powers—their relationship dramatically changes.
Gabe hadn’t looked at mina the same since the night outside Papa Leo’s when they’d discovered Samson’s body. The truth was, she wasn’t sure how to look at herself, either . . . What could she say? . . . I can summon these weird supernatural creatures from the shadows, make them into whatever form I want them to take, and then tell them what to do, so do you still want to go out?
Yet, for all its high tension and 80’s horror-flick tropes, the novel roots itself in character. Mina’s heartbreak, her longing for normalcy, and the crushing knowledge that life may not deliver the escape she imagines vibrate under the page-turning spectacle and give the book its marrow. Mina’s triumph, or at least her survival, becomes as meaningful as the monster-hunt subplot.
Where Dark Things Rise isn’t a comfortable read: it asks that you feel power and its costs, cruelty and its roots, hope and its fractures. Still, this novel is ambitious, and if you believe in stories where the real monsters are human, where the darkest things are those we refuse to face, then Mina’s coming-of-age journey will grip you. This novel isn’t just a sequel—it stands boldly and fiercely on its own.
Andrew Clark
Andrew K. Clark is a writer from Western North Carolina where his people settled before the Revolutionary War. His poetry collection, Jesus in the Trailer, was published by Main Street Rag Press and shortlisted for the Able Muse Book Award. His work has appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, UCLA’s Out of Anonymity, Appalachian Review, Rappahannock Review, The Wrath Bearing Tree, and many other journals. He received his MFA from Converse College.
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