July 31, 2025
Dark Like Under, by Alice Chadwick
The story begins so late at night that it might already be tomorrow, Robin and Jonah taking chances, walking on a weir, taking chances too in being together at all—Jonah is Robin’s best friend Tin’s sometime boyfriend. They’re pushing their luck. Something terrible is going to happen, it is clear, and just what that something terrible is comes into focus at an assembly at school the next day when the reviled head announces that a well-liked teacher, Mr. Adennes, whom Robin and Jonah had met on their meanderings the night before, is dead. And everything after that seems to ricochet, the narrative full of traps and holes, shifting between the perspectives of students and teachers moving forward through the day, their understanding of the tragedy seen through the lenses of their own experiences, informed by their own traumas and heartaches, grudges and preoccupations. Tin providing as much as a centre to this tale as anything, because she’s the kind of person who draws people to her (for better or for worse), who makes “hot, empty days sparkle like broken glass,” and their teacher’s death reaches back to something terrible that happened to her years before, the image of broken glass enduring throughout the text, shiny, sharp and dangerous.
Alice Chadwick’s DARK LIKE UNDER, set in the 1980s admist the community of a grammar school in northern England, is slow, character-driven, intensely engaging at the sentence level, and disorienting as the story moves between characters, deep into their minds, their pasts, into their homes, class distinctions usually unspoken, but ever-defining. It’s a deep dive into a dark sea, and beautifully spellbinding.
