Eve Ottenberg

Dark Is the Night Eve Ottenberg

This murder story set in the great but run-down and second-rate East Coast city of D___, against the backdrop of 1960s counterculture, political activism and revolutionary violence, chronicles the intent of a drug-dealing hippie, who doubles as a police spy, to cash in on his girlfriend's death. Mob violence, political corruption, a virulently reactionary mayor and a decent legislator's attempt to unseat him weave together in a pattern of plots and subplots that ensnare artists, union organizers and people of goodwill in the coils of the coldly triumphant wicked. The social panorama of loan sharks, high society heirs and the psychotic homeless shifts from light to shade and hope to despair, as people in a landscape of unrelieved gloom and iniquity struggle to survive against a predatory world without and against powerful, ambiguous forces within. Above all, Dark Is the Night is a story about evil and the struggle against it, in the dark depths of the human soul.