Fiction by Paul Cody, reviewed by Rachel Shaver
WALK THE DARK (Regal House)

From the very first sentence of Paul Cody’s Walk the Dark, we are primed for a story of discovery, not just for the main character Oliver, but for us, the readers. All his life, Oliver has been surrounded by the brokenness that will eventually consume him, most vividly modeled by his mother’s descent into late-stage addiction. He doesn’t remember the first time he tried a pain pill, only that he was too young to understand what it was. Given to him by his mother and her friend, he learns far too early what it means to dull the jagged edges of his tumultuous life with pills. “How was this gonna end up? Where was any of this going? To a hospital? To a prison? Where else?” Cody’s narration poses these questions not to guide Oliver, but to lull us into thinking we know how this story will go—that his path is inevitable. Yet just when you  think you understand the trajectory of Oliver’s life or any of the characters’ stories, Cody shifts the narrative. Oliver’s actions, whether tender or criminal, constantly challenge our assumptions, leaving him a mystery again.

As Oliver’s life spirals, he becomes one with the darkness he fears yet cannot escape. Alone and insecure, he is swallowed by a world that never truly sees him, and he, in turn, becomes its unseen shadow. He knows everyone he meets—their names, their roles, their stories as they present them—but no one truly knows him, not even himself. This deliberate, haunting isolation is at the heart of Cody’s storytelling, portraying a life deeply affected by neglect and the ache for identity. Oliver’s journey is not one of redemption for his actions but a fragmented search through the names, half-forgotten memories, and numbing haze of drugs for something more valuable: the weightlessness of his own personal forgiveness.

In Walk the Dark, the story unfolds through these names, each one a fragment of identity. From childhood, Oliver Curtin knows only a few people, but even his mother is fractured into countless identities. Margaret is never just Mother or Mommy; she’s Maggie, Marge, Peg, Peggie—a sex worker, a junkie, a fading presence in his life. And Oliver is not just Oliver. He’s Ollie and All, a tall, quiet kid, and a murderer serving a life sentence. Names in Paul Cody’s world are a way of knowing, but they are also the barrier to it—a way of fragmenting identity and distancing the characters from themselves and each other. For Oliver, names become the markers of a life he can’t adapt to, a way of being both known and unknowable, seen yet unseen. Cody uses this tension to draw us into a story of alienation where identity is as fleeting and fragmented as memory itself.

One of Paul Cody’s most effective craft choices in Walk the Dark is his use of a confiding rather than a confessing voice. Rather than revealing everything in an attempt at absolution, the narration is restrained and introspective, revealing fragments of Oliver’s life with the hesitancy of someone uncertain if they’re even worth being understood. This confiding voice invites readers to listen closely, drawing us into Oliver’s hidden pain and fractured self-perception, and letting us glimpse his inner world not to justify his actions, but to illuminate the shadows of a broken life. 

Then I thought of Maggie and her needles. I thought of her skin, and what she said about junkies. Ivy, I almost said. My mother. Ivy might have stopped and turned to me. In the strange, silvery light of the moon. On a late September night. Needles, I might have said. Heroin. That was a thing I might have done.

The confiding tone is complemented by Cody’s fragmented storytelling, which mirrors the disjointed and unreliable nature of Oliver’s memories. The narrative is not a straightforward recounting of events, but rather a collage of moments, names, and sensations that accumulate over time, each piece deepening our understanding of Oliver’s inner landscape. There is a cluttered feel to his reciting of his life, full of repeated details as if he’s forgotten he’s told them already. Reading the narrative is like walking slowly along with Oliver; all he asks is that we stay and listen. Each chapter is a new story of his life and these unchronological vignettes of addiction, crime, and loneliness are hauntingly effective in showing how Oliver’s experiences are disjointed, how they slip through his fingers without coherence or closure. 

Cody further intensifies the suspense by withholding key elements of Oliver’s story until the end. There is an artful restraint in what is left unsaid, in what the narrator chooses to reveal only in passing or to hint at without detail. The delayed revelation allows Cody to maintain an atmosphere of mystery and inevitability, creating a sense that we must set aside our judgment and allow Oliver to simply be. 

To walk the dark, as Oliver calls it, is at a surface level, to continue straying down the wrong path; it’s his own alienation and inability to find those who care for him. But beyond that, it is about knowing the darkness and feeling as if he is becoming it, as he slips further into the margins of society where he has been sentenced to exist from birth. In the end, Paul Cody’s novel is an exploration of the things done in the name of love—or whatever fragile semblance of it he can grasp at. Cody’s use of close, almost claustrophobic narration pulls us directly into Oliver’s fractured world, where boundaries between love and harm are blurred. Whether Oliver is inside a prison cell or standing unseen in the silence of night, Cody’s prose makes both spaces feel suffocating and inescapable. 

I tried to imagine, for a moment or two, that the bars and the cell were part of a dream, a slow-moving nightmare, and I had done something terrible which had brought me here. But it was a dream, I imagined, that I had committed an awful crime, and that I was in a cell, with bars, a slab to sleep on, a toilet, and that I would be here for much of my life.

Walk the Dark is about knowing and wishing to be known, and it is the careful telling of a life in the shadows. Hope comes in the simple, fleeting moments where Oliver dares to look for connection—when he reflects on love, or when he reaches for meaning in a world that has given him so little. It is in these moments that Cody reminds us the darkness is not absolute. The possibility for light, for understanding, and for redemption is always there, waiting to be found. Cody’s writing is a constant reminder that one’s fate is never sealed—that the darkness is all-consuming, but the light is always there within reach. 

Rachel Shaver graduated from Eckerd College in 2024 with a BA in creative writing and a minor in literature. She lives in Tampa, Florida with her twin sister and spends her days consuming media in all forms. She has been published in Collision Literary Magazine and worked as editor-in-chief for Eckerd Review.