Things We Do in the Dark

From Harry K. Thaw to O. J. Simpson, from Fatty Arbuckle to JonBenét Ramsey, from Leopold and Loeb to Robert Durst, from the Menendez brothers to John du Pont, grisly murders involving the wealthy become media circuses. At the dark heart of the novel is the culture-wide fascination with violent crimes, particularly when involving those who are famous, those who are wealthy. Hillier also explores how the crime itself can make a person into a celebrity and catapult them into media attention and tabloid scrutiny. Jimmy Peralta is not merely a 60-something retiree slashed to death by a straight razor in his bathtub. He is a celebrity, and so fans become enthralled by the murder of someone they have never met. Paris realizes the reach of celebrity as the lurid details of her husband’s death appear in news magazines and on tabloid television shows. His murder grows exponentially more fascinating when the terms of his estate are made public—he was worth millions.

A generation earlier, Joey’s mother had been catapulted into similar notoriety when she was at the center of what was then dubbed Canada’s crime of the century: the decapitation of a prominent and wealthy Toronto banker and philanthropist. Drew recalls how all his friends in high school followed the trial; their parents pored over “titillating” newspaper accounts of the horrific killing (70). The murder, he remembers, “was so much fun to talk about” (70). Now, Drew conducts a podcast that looks into these high-profile crimes in which the public feels a vested interest. That podcast, his PR agent coos, enthralls millions. Since the podcast forms the title of the novel, the title draws attention to the fact that the novel itself also turns violent crime into entertainment, implicating the reader in the moral quandaries of this theme.

Hellier explores this moral quandary throughout the novel. How can such pain be so casually repackaged as entertainment? Why do people take such a keen interest in the dark details of celebrities’ private lives and their messy deaths? Hillier uses Paris as a sympathetic figure to reflect on the harm inherent in this form of entertainment. Paris is both a grieving widow who struggles to process the emotional devastation of the murder of her husband and a reluctant celebrity whose pain is analyzed in public forums and whose image—a grainy black-and-white photo of her arrest in handcuffs wearing a blood-soaked tank top—appears on television, in newspapers, and in pulpy tabloids. Her private grief is on public display. The novel is ultimately ambivalent about violent crime as entertainment: It critiques it through the characterization of Paris yet itself forms part of this genre.

“Jimmy Peralta was the love of this life, the one she built from the ashes of her old one” (22). Suggested by her several names and her cache of forged identification papers and birth certificates, Joey is haunted by the secrets of her past. Things We Do in the Dark takes as its narrative theme the consequences when identity becomes plural and explores the emotional and psychological toll such an accumulation of secrets inevitably takes.

Paris is careful never to let any one person know her entire past. She selects the experiences to share and grows adept at lying. She artfully dodged any attempts, even by the most sincere child-welfare counselor, to probe too deeply into her secrets. Her burden is heavy. She keeps many secrets: the abusive treatment by her mother; the sexual molestations by her mother’s boyfriend and then by her uncle; her decapitation of Charles Baxter with the ice skate; her stabbing of her uncle with a box cutter; her burning of her only friend; the intricate switching of identities; the perjury that imprisons her mother for a quarter of a century. Hillier uses a metaphor of Ukrainian matryoshka dolls to suggest the psychological implications of keeping secrets; in the gift shop in Vancouver, Paris examines a nested doll where opening one exposes another doll, the same and yet vastly different. Hillier suggests that the consequences of keeping secrets include never opening yourself up to show your true self to another person.

Paris’s skill for keeping secrets is in the end her best and only strategy for surviving what she undergoes. Deftly, she “step[s] out of one life and into another” (64). She attempts to live her life in a consequence-free environment: She lies, she steals, she kills, and in the end she steps free of accountability. The police arrest her mother, who angrily spits out the truth, but she is dismissed as irrational even as they watch “Joey’s” ashes float out in the middle of the pond. “Aren’t you Jimmy Peralta’s wife?” one of the officers asks. “That’s me,” says Joey/Paris without irony (342). Yet the novel ends as she moves into a life with someone who knows her identity secrets, Drew, suggesting that freeing herself from secrets means freeing herself from emotional consequences that inhibit romantic relationships.