Dark Things I Adore

By: Katie Lattari

Narrated by: Jim Meskimen, Stacey Glemboski, Nicol Zanzarella

A debut thriller for fans of Lucy Foley and Liz Moore, Dark Things I Adore is a stunning Gone Girl-esque tale of atonement that proves that in the grasp of manipulative men, women may momentarily fall. But in the hands of fierce women, men will be brought to their knees.

Three campfire secrets. Two witnesses. One dead in the trees. And the woman, 30 years later, bent on making the guilty finally pay.

The year 1988. A group of outcasts gather at a small prestigious arts camp nestled in the Maine woods. They’re the painters: bright, hopeful, teeming with potential. But secrets and dark ambitions rise like smoke from a campfire, and the truths they tell will come back to haunt them in ways more deadly than they dreamed.

The year 2018. Esteemed art professor Max Durant arrives at his protégé’s remote home to view her graduate thesis collection. He knows Audra is beautiful and brilliant. He knows being invited into her private world is a rare gift. But he doesn't know that Audra has engineered every aspect of their weekend together. Every detail, every conversation. Audra has woven the perfect web.

Only Audra knows what happened that summer in 1988. Max’s secret, and the dark things that followed. And even though it won’t be easy, Audra knows someone must pay.

A searing psychological thriller of trauma, dark academia, complicity, and revenge, Dark Things I Adore unravels the realities behind campfire legends - the horrors that happen in the dark, the girls who become cautionary tales, and the guilty who go unpunished. Until now.

©2021 Katie Lattari (P)2021 Blackstone Publishing

WHAT?!

Oh my goodness. This book keeps you on your toes the entire time. What you think is going to happen? Forget that. Literally so many twists and turns. I began to question who we could and couldn’t trust. I finished this book so quickly and immediately felt the need to recommend it to everyone. Definitely recommend if you like murder mysteries/ true crime!!

Best Crime-Noncrime Story of the Moment

It is also a thriller-non thriller, a mystery at its best. The story is well woven, intricate, layered, with its own rhythm. Each psychological detail is nakedly bare. The art theme is unmistakable. Follow it and every piece will fall in exact place right to the very end. Not a book for skip and skim reading. Narrators' perfomance is superb.

A promising but overlong debut thriller

I wish I had something new and insightful to say about Dark Things I Adore, but I am pretty much joining the choir of previous reviewers. The author, Katie Lattari, is going to be one to watch in the future. She shows a lot of talent. She is a gifted wordsmith, and if this were a shorter and tighter story, Dark Things I Adore would have worked for me. I love a good cat-and-mouse story.

However, as others have said, this story is overly long, especially because you figure out who the key players are and where it is going pretty early on. Max is a frustrating character. He is a smart academic, but boy did he fail to pick up on all the major red flags being thrown his way. When he does begin to truly suspect something rotten in Denmark, so to speak, he just keeps going along with everything like a dupe. Our lead in the modern narrative, Audra, blames what happened to her mother on everyone but the person who is most to blame for the event. I understand that it might have been one of her blindsides, but I did not really get her attachment to her mom, given how little time she spent with her mom.

The scenes at camp went on and on and should have been a much shorter portion of the story. Plus, some of the transitions from past to present were jarring. I understand the need for the flashbacks, but there could have been less of them, as the flashbacks took us out of the current and more interesting story.

Overall, I am looking forward to seeing what Katie Lattari writes next, but I just hope that she cuts down on the flowery language and lets a fair but brutal editor take a look at her next work. Dark Things I Adore could have been at least an hour or so shorter.

Dark things indeed!

This is a mind blowing novel ! Just when you think all has been explained and all is well … snick snick snick snick !

Intrigued with art school plot…

As a visual artist professional, I was Intrigued with art school plot but found the story and characters were a bit long winded.
I gave a lower rating as the story could have wrapped sooner for more impact - in fact, I fast forwarded as the writing went on too long and writing did not merit sticking with it.

Beautiful, Ugly, Dark & Deep

Wow… This is truly an artistic, clever literary work of fictional art. I am giving it only 4 stars overall because it took me soooo long to get into it. It’s so slow, serious, deep, poetic and dark that I won’t be able read or listen to another one like this for a while.

I have a huge girl crush on Nicol Zanzarella, so as usual, she kept me in the game when I might have given up. It was worth it.

Calculated Revenge

An intricate tale of a young woman’s struggles and the justice paid for her torment. Mental health, self harm, revenge, retribution, and the journey to get there.

Great read

Each character was very interesting. A very interesting story using very different characters was nice change

Good story, great ending

While I’m not an artist, nor ever will be, I enjoyed the storyline. My issue was keeping track in my mind the artists real names and their art colony pseudonyms. I finally had to resort to pen and paper to keep everyone straight. Otherwise, while I found the hiding places of the notes to be dubious, I liked the book.

good contemporary horror

found this to be a good contemporary twist on a horror story, and found the narration to be excellent