Darrin Doyle
10th Anniversary
2nd Edition
October 7, 2025 includes a new, unpublished story and a foreword by Giano Cromley
Order HERE
or ask your local bookstore!​
(Also available at Bookshop.org, Amazon, Barnes and Noble)
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.
Praise for The Dark Will End The Dark
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 The Waters
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
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
Like the Dadaist collages that revolutionized art, 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, author of The Keeper
"The Dark Will End the Dark is creepy, violent, and dreamlike. And it isn’t just a trifle – even days after you’ve lent the book to a friend or added it to your bookcase, you’ll find yourself wondering about the stories’ broader meanings. You’ll find yourself ruminating, sorting through the details, trying to get to the bottom of these bizarre stories."
-Fiction Southeast
"It’s for the lover of twisted tales, the Tim Burton-movie enthusiast, those who delight in the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Flannery O’Connor, or Edgar Allan Poe. It’s for those willing to bring dark things into light, examine all their sides, and appreciate complexities enough to leave questions unanswered—even let them go."
-New Pages