PotsandPlots

All the Colours of the Dark is a popular book. It has over 100,000 reviews on Amazon, over 70% of which are 5-star. It is widely read and well-regarded. I wasn’t as struck by it as most readers seem to be. My quick assessment of All the Colours is that it’s at best a 4* book. Probably 3.5.

Growing Information:

Plant With: Thriller, Serial Killers, Sprawling Epic

Grows Into: An intriguing, if convoluted, journey into small-town America, and the shades of dark and light found within.

Rating: Hardy Perennial 🌻🌻(Check here for rating information.)

Available now in paperback (affiliate link).

The Review:

All the Colours of the Dark describes terrible events that befall ordinary folks in small-town America. It falls somewhere between a Stephen King behemoth such as Under the Dome and the examination of the dark heart of a small town in Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead.

It lacks the supernatural hook of the former and the forensic dissection of the latter. Nevertheless, I found it very readable.

Despite clocking in at almost 600 pages, I read All the Colours reasonably quickly. Its short chapter style, with repeated hooks, pulls the reader along. There are a number of unresolved questions that subtly shift over the course of the novel. As we learn new pieces of information, we’re drawn further into the book’s sprawling plot.

Despite that, I would say the book is overlong. It’s artfully constructed but would have been a cleaner read with fewer misdirects and maybe one or two fewer nods to the big themes of late 20th-century America.

It also relies far too heavily on coincidence. Coincidence to resolve plot problems is a massive bugbear of mine. All the Colours has far too many convenient meet-ups for me to truly find it believable. Similarly, the skill set of the book’s various protagonists fitted perfectly for what the story needed.

There’s some argument to be said that desperation provided the motivation for the character trajectories, but, for me at least, too many people were too conveniently very good at the things they needed to be very good at, for the whole mosaic that is All the Colours to succeed.

Does That Really Matter?

Possibly not.

I enjoyed the historical overview of the last 50 or so years of the United States and the book delivers 3 or 4 genuinely “wow” moments when its twists are revealed. Author Chris Whitaker subtly manipulates his readers’ assumptions to hoodwink them, which I found clever. He fooled me more than once by using my own preconceptions against me.

I do not regret a single moment of reading All the Colours of the Dark. This is a book group book, and I know from the pre-meet discussion that some have found it overwritten.

The descriptions are definitely on the rich side. There is a lot of background information given. This helped Whitaker create space in which to twist his characters and his readers around, but I can see why you might find it dragged in the middle. While I was pulled along, I did also find myself wishing we’d hurry up and get to the point.

The last hundred pages or so are very tense. All the depth charges Whitaker had hidden inside his novel are detonated to great effect. Although I might not have been happy about some of the setup, there is no arguing that the denouement is powerful and exciting.

Ultimately, All the Colours of the Dark didn’t quite feel “real” enough for me. The novel tries for a deeper hit than modern police procedural, such as a Michael Connelly Bosch novel, but its extra layers didn’t make it better. The central mystery is too obscured to be a true page turner but the associated social commentary is not sharp enough to justify its existence. Whitaker is no Kingsolver. All the Colours of the Dark is a well-constructed thriller, but falls short of being a great novel of our times.