# Frank Reviews: Arraborough Book 2, The Darkness by Eddie Drueding



## M. LeRenard (Jul 6, 2013)

I haven't done one of these in a while, I know, but I wanted to at least give a shoutout to this book once it hit the shelves, so to speak, so here it is.

So, when I first started thinking about doing furry book reviews, the one major goal I had in mind was to find some book or series of books written with a main cast of furry characters that fit my idea of 'a really good book'.  Now, that definition is, of course, personal to me, as it would be to anyone else who deigned to come up with his own such definition, but essentially it's this: a really good book is a book that is easy to slip into, that keeps you there while you're reading it, that keeps you guessing, that sparks your imagination, and that dares to make you uncomfortable.  I've read a couple of books that incorporate several of those qualities, but it's been hard to find one that has all of them.

Obviously this is leading up to this statement: Eddie Drueding's books fit the bill.  They have something which is truly difficult to find in any creative medium, from music to art to literature, which is a near-perfect combo of imagination, childlike wonder, and maturity.  The setting of the books, Arraborough, was founded in the first book on pure naive and childish principles.  The characters were all portrayed as being somewhat childlike as well, each a little bit of a stereotype in their own ways.  And yet there was always this undercurrent of deep mystery and darkness; not every character was easy to understand, there were discussions of old wars, of secret societies, the mob, unmarked graves, and so on.  You were never quite sure if everything was going to turn out all right in the end.

The second book, The Darkness (not to be confused with Star Trek: Into Darkness), expands on the themes set up in the first book.  It really plays with your mind as you read it, constantly leading your thoughts one way only to jerk you around and reveal that it's been another way all along, setting up huge mysteries and just giving you the slightest revelations, bit by bit.  Every character is fleshed out much more in this book, and it's done by way of an enigma of a character who appears roughly out of nowhere and seems to be acting out of some magical omnipotence.  We start to learn more about the mysterious characters set up before (the squirrel Fespin, the cat Pimlico, the dog Dovan), but only a little, and only to divulge more of the deeper mysteries built into the setting.

The whole atmosphere of this book and the last banks on there being a confusion between magic and technology.  You're never entirely sure if there's just one or both, which means you don't know which is the acting force.  Things seem almost standard Earth, with animals substituted for humans: there are cars, psychologists, militaries, competing business interests, crime syndicates, and everything else.  But then there's the strange blue-eyed animals, there's a secretive society of apes and monkeys, a house that only lets certain people inside, a forest that seems to have a mind of its own, and Fespin, who seems to be half in another world, acts like a child, and yet apparently holds some immense power that scares the shit out of everyone there when they aren't playing ball with him.  It's all rather glorious.

If you didn't get interested in this series with my review of the first book, please do get interested now, and keep a lookout for the following books as well (there will be many more, or so I've been told).  These books deserve at the very least a substantial cult following, and probably they deserve more than that.

You can purchase this one at Melange Books: http://www.melange-books.com/authors/eddiedrueding/thedarkness.html
Go check it out.


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## Pimlico (Jul 6, 2013)

As always, free digital copies of the series are available to FAF members.

(Hard copies are "free" too if you pay me back for my own purchase and subsequent postage, but that works out to be about the same as buying them on Amazon, so probably best to do it that way.)


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