Darrin Doyle is celebrating the 10th anniversary of his story collection The Dark Will End the Dark with a cool new release and a brand new story included. The stories all revolve around body parts, and they are incredibly unsettling.
“In these haunting stories, our gods are dead, our beloved are ghosts, our body parts are burned, deformed, missing, even fed to our children – and still we humans go on hoping, wanting, hurting, and hungering.”
--Kelcey Ervick, author of The Keeper
by Darrin Doyle
October 7, 2025
A group of tugboat passengers grapples with a disturbing loss. A record-holding hiccuper confronts his condition—and a troubling secret. A wife wonders what to do when her husband’s head stops working—but his body stays alive. A man struggles with the memory of the time he saw his friend swallowed whole by a neighborhood girl with supernatural powers.
In this classic set of Midwestern Gothic stories by Darrin Doyle, we see the strange hold hands with the familiar—and seem all the more strange as a result. A set of tall tales (and medium-height ones) told with Nabokovian prose, this stunning and visceral collection by the author of The Beast in Aisle 34 will linger long after the last page.
Originally published in 2015, this revised tenth anniversary edition features a new introduction by American Mythology author Giano Cromley.
Reviews
"Doyle's stories are lamentations, demented fairy tales, and quests for enlightenment in which the author explores bodily dysfunction and ungainly lust while familial love hums in the background. In the manner of George Saunders, Doyle uses his smart, light language to lift readers above the darkness of shame and humiliation that brings so many of his characters to their knees."
— Bonnie Jo Campbell, author of Once Upon a River and American Salvage, finalist for the National Book Award
"Darrin Doyle's a mad scientist who has stitched together a hauntingly beautiful collection from tattered body parts and a strange, ragged heart. It is only after you've been defibrillated by the stories in The Dark Will End the Dark that you realize you've been dozing through the days. Doyle's got his fingers on the pulse of our brave new American psyche and his writing blazes electric."
— Jason Ockert, author of Wasp Box and Neighbors of Nothing
"The human body, logic, and language are all rent apart and remade dazzlingly anew in these fourteen stories. With the droll fabulism of Nikolai Gogol and the moral heft of Shirley Jackson, Doyle's characters face problems both surreal and all-too-real...Fantastical yet close to the bone, these stories are both wounding and wondrous."
— Monica McFawn, author of Bright Shards of Someplace Else, winner of the Flannery O' Connor Award
"Like the Dadaist collages of Raoul Hausmann, The Dark Will End the Dark presents a startling disjunction of body parts—head, foot, mouth, neck—arranged so artfully and terrifyingly by Darrin Doyle that one is confronted with the human body's beauty and brokenness. In these haunting stories, our gods are dead, our beloveds are ghosts, our body parts are burned, deformed, missing, even fed to our children—and still we humans go on hoping, wanting, hurting, and hungering."
— Kelcey Ervick Parker, author of For Sale By Owner
Darrin Doyle
Face
Another morning, another foggy mind clinging to the silky threads of dream. Daylight merely a hope, an assumption. Daylight an arrival counted upon for no reason other than each day preceding.
The man washed at the sink. He lathered his cheeks and dragged the razor over the skin. He heard a prickly scraping sound as the blade shore the stubble.
The man tried to recall a moment in his life when he wasn’t standing at the bathroom mirror. Memories floated like vapor. Was he a father? Yes, it seemed so. Were his children boys? Girls? Either way they were not here, either moved or dead or never born. Would he see them again? Yes or no, it was a fifty-fifty proposition. Those odds had a nice balance.
Symmetry in the natural order. Day and night. Light and dark. His face. The distance between eyes. Width and length of nostrils. Equality of the lips.
His wife’s face – if indeed he had a wife – had been beautiful in her symmetry. The lovely harmony of her teeth when she smiled, wrinkling her cheeks which in turn wrinkled the skin around her eyes. The connectivity – yes, it had been inscribed upon her features.
The children had hugged and laughed with him. His wife had hugged and laughed with him. He had reciprocated. Theirs had been a world of connection and balance.
He rinsed the excess lather. He brushed his teeth with a motion that resembled the whorls on his fingerprints.
His life began each morning. Every morning he brushed away the dust of sleep, the encroachment of decay.
In the mirror, the man noticed the aberration.
His left eye had scooted or slid, he didn’t know. The eye was centered, socket and all, on his cheek. He tried without success to push the eye back where it had been, where it had resided his entire life. (Unless, perhaps, it had done this before?)
His face no longer resembled his face. Or it looked like his face but a comical or tragic version. A dis-repaired self, one not ready for the stage of life.
The man’s nose and mouth had also switched positions. His face appeared to scream without sound, then to frown. His nostrils flared while shaving lotion burned his nose hairs.
He wondered if he should cry out. He wondered if it would make any difference if he cried out.
Would his wife come rushing up the stairs? Would his children trail behind?
If she flung open the door, what would she see?
Would she be able to mentally reassemble the man’s face – the face she had presumably fallen in love with? Would she believe that this man was, indeed, her husband?
Or would the man find his wife’s face now unrecognizable?
Her features the same, but out of order. A chaos of identity like a broken vase. Her nose jutting from her temple; eyes looking out from her chin; lips vertical and set where her nose used to be.
His children would huddle behind her, their faces puzzles unassembled.
Together they would be a collection of strangers frightened.
The man would turn calmly back toward the mirror, flip up his shirt collar and loop his necktie. There would be no reason to panic. This sort of thing was bound to happen eventually.
The family would return to their respective rooms, their private locations in the universe.
The house would remain silent, as it was now and had always been.
And the man would stand at the mirror, securing his tie, waiting for order.
Face
Another morning, another foggy mind clinging to the silky threads of dream. Daylight merely a hope, an assumption. Daylight an arrival counted upon for no reason other than each day preceding.
The man washed at the sink. He lathered his cheeks and dragged the razor over the skin. He heard a prickly scraping sound as the blade shore the stubble.
The man tried to recall a moment in his life when he wasn’t standing at the bathroom mirror. Memories floated like vapor. Was he a father? Yes, it seemed so. Were his children boys? Girls? Either way they were not here, either moved or dead or never born. Would he see them again? Yes or no, it was a fifty-fifty proposition. Those odds had a nice balance.
Symmetry in the natural order. Day and night. Light and dark. His face. The distance between eyes. Width and length of nostrils. Equality of the lips.
His wife’s face – if indeed he had a wife – had been beautiful in her symmetry. The lovely harmony of her teeth when she smiled, wrinkling her cheeks which in turn wrinkled the skin around her eyes. The connectivity – yes, it had been inscribed upon her features.
The children had hugged and laughed with him. His wife had hugged and laughed with him. He had reciprocated. Theirs had been a world of connection and balance.
He rinsed the excess lather. He brushed his teeth with a motion that resembled the whorls on his fingerprints.
His life began each morning. Every morning he brushed away the dust of sleep, the encroachment of decay.
In the mirror, the man noticed the aberration.
His left eye had scooted or slid, he didn’t know. The eye was centered, socket and all, on his cheek. He tried without success to push the eye back where it had been, where it had resided his entire life. (Unless, perhaps, it had done this before?)
His face no longer resembled his face. Or it looked like his face but a comical or tragic version. A dis-repaired self, one not ready for the stage of life.
The man’s nose and mouth had also switched positions. His face appeared to scream without sound, then to frown. His nostrils flared while shaving lotion burned his nose hairs.
He wondered if he should cry out. He wondered if it would make any difference if he cried out.
Would his wife come rushing up the stairs? Would his children trail behind?
If she flung open the door, what would she see?
Would she be able to mentally reassemble the man’s face – the face she had presumably fallen in love with? Would she believe that this man was, indeed, her husband?
Or would the man find his wife’s face now unrecognizable?
Her features the same, but out of order. A chaos of identity like a broken vase. Her nose jutting from her temple; eyes looking out from her chin; lips vertical and set where her nose used to be.
His children would huddle behind her, their faces puzzles unassembled.
Together they would be a collection of strangers frightened.
The man would turn calmly back toward the mirror, flip up his shirt collar and loop his necktie. There would be no reason to panic. This sort of thing was bound to happen eventually.
The family would return to their respective rooms, their private locations in the universe.
The house would remain silent, as it was now and had always been.
And the man would stand at the mirror, securing his tie, waiting for order.
About the Author
website
Darrin Doyle has lived in Saginaw, Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, Osaka, Cincinnati, Louisville, and Manhattan (Kansas, not the other one). At long last, he has settled in Mount Pleasant, MI, where he teaches at Central Michigan University. He is pretty sure Bigfoot exists but has no evidence. He likes to play a variety of musical instruments, mostly stringed ones. He searches for food that is too spicy.
His short stories have appeared in Puerto del Sol, The Long Story, Cottonwood, Alaska Quarterly Review, Night Train, Harpur Palate, Laurel Review, The MacGuffin, and other journals. He has received fellowships and scholarships from the Sewanee Writers Conference and the NY Summer Writers Institute.
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