Review - The Sound of the Dark by Daniel Church

The Sound of the Dark

Daniel Church
Angry Robot, 28 October 2025
Available as: PB, 400pp, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781915998408

I'm grateful to the publisher for sending me a copy of The Sound of the Dark to consider for review.

Though this book is set during the summer, it would make great reading (and a great present!) for a landscape-horror to consider at this, the darkest time of the year. In particular, The Sound of the Dark, as its name suggests, makes superb use of sound as a channel and metaphor for the insinuation of evil. 

It therefore feels very current - the true-crime podcaster in fiction is fast, I think, becoming the modern day equivalent of those slightly fusty academics MR James wrote about - the ones who come across an oddity in a manuscript from the previous century, investigate it... and suffer the consequences.

Whether "the consequences" arise from the malice of an evil spirit, or more mundane human wickedness, or a combination of both, there's something about the hapless investigator pulling an unravelling strand from the past and trying to establish what really happened that provides the perfect gateway to horror. That feeling one has that they are in for trouble and should draw back - but knowing that they won't, and waiting and wanting to see exactly how bad it gets.

And in The Sound of the Dark, that's very bad indeed.

With folk horror vibes, Church's new novel focusses first on a murder-suicide that took place in the 80s when a troubled artist destroyed first his family and then himself. He'd been poking around in a disused RAF station, Warden Fell. 

(Who was the warden, we might wonder. Against what were they on guard?)

Forty years later, podcaster Cally Darker stumbles across Tony Mathias's story. Darker, herself troubled and in a relationship with a controlling boyfriend, digs enthusiastically into what records she can find. I had a distinct sense that Cally was using Tony's story to escape from her own rather grim reality. She is an engaging and, as the story proceeds, increasingly brave and determined young woman, but she certainly has Issues. (Kudos to Church for telling us just enough about her family background to give the outlines there, but not holding up the story by providing too much detail).

Ultimately, Cally lays hands on some relics of Tony's life that will cast light on those events in 1983. Or perhaps, cast darkness. Because there is a sense of a taint here - a darkness at noon - as something ancient and amiss seems to be at work even under the midsummer sun. This subversion of the usual horror conventions only makes things seem more eerie, more out of joint, as we see the ancient horror beginning to take form, or rather, as we hear it - this book is haunted by a whispering, by an insinuating quality of sonic presence. Church captures that sense you sometimes get alone in a house, or awake in the small hours, when there's a noise and you lie there trying to work out what it was, half convincing yourself there wasn't a sound at all, even though you know there was.

Take that, energise it, and bring into broad daylight and you'll appreciate how Cally begins to feel as she discovers more and more about Tony, tracks down witnesses to his life and deaf, and begin to listen to his tapes. It's a creeping horror that coexists with the very mundane. And she still has to navigate that mundane - the nasty boyfriend, the lack of a job and money, her flaky mental health 9could all this just be some sort of episode?) 

In the best traditions of folk horror, everything is under threat, but it's not clear how....

For more information about The Sound of the Dark, see the publisher's website here.