Dark Inside

The first book in a tetralogy of the same name, Jeyn Roberts’s fantasy environmental catastrophe novel Dark Inside (2011) concerns the aftermath of a series of major earthquakes that ravaged every major landmass on Earth. The quakes have an inexplicable emotional effect on humankind, instilling in them an uncontrollable rage and propensity for violence. It moves through the parallel stories of four young adults, Mason, Aries, Michael, and Clementine, who struggle to survive both their environments and themselves by taming their haywire emotions. The novel has been loosely adapted into a film that similarly explores the fears and anxieties of environmental destruction.

The novel begins as Mason rushes to a hospital, having heard that his mother has just been severely injured in a car crash. The doctor tells him that he is unsure whether she will live through the night. Having already lost his father as a young child, he goes into a state of shock with the realization that he may lose both of his parents before adulthood. The situation immediately worsens when he looks at a hospital television and sees that his high school has been the site of an alleged terrorist bombing, which has killed many of his friends. Mason learns that the attack was not a concerted act of terrorism, but rather a tragedy carried out seemingly at random by people with no history of violence or mental illness.

The story next focuses on Aries, a theater student riding on a public bus to practice for a show. She is distracted by a seemingly insane man babbling incoherently about the world coming to an end. She barely manages to hide her irritation; however, when the man starts counting down to his alleged end of the world, she panics. When he finishes his countdown, the ground erupts from a quake, throwing the bus sideways off the road. Aries is suddenly surrounded in the enclosed space by dead and severely wounded people. With the help of the strange man, she pries herself out of the debris and makes it to her high school. The man warns her that the crash is only the beginning of the apocalypse, insinuating that she will soon be pursued by a vague “they.”



The story moves on to Clementine’s narrative, which takes place slightly later than those of Mason and Aries. A resident of a small town, she arrives at its central gathering hall to hear an update on the bizarre series of unprecedented and seemingly random catastrophes. She is wary of two men, respected citizens of her village, when they enter with guns and take the stage. Clementine’s mother acts on a sudden instinct, forcing her to leave the hall. As she exits, she hears shots fired inside, an event matching the terrorist attack at Mason’s school. She runs away and takes shelter, making her presence unknown to possible survivors.

The final narrative concerns Michael, a teen who is driving around with some friends when the quakes hit. His idea to take a joyride screeches to a halt when he and his friends witness a car run over a motorcyclist in cold blood, a moment of extremely escalated road rage. The police arrive and the driver’s anger has an infectious impact on the officers, who execute him on the spot. Michael runs away from the scene, leaving his friends behind. He makes it home and stocks up on supplies with which to hide and stave off the viral rage propagating through town, learning that no one in his community can be trusted anymore.

By the end of the novel, the world’s population is decimated. Mason, Clementine, Aries, and Michael survive, having adapted uniquely to the sudden supremacy of the evil impulses in their communities. Though the world is profoundly socially degraded, the ending offers hope of future community and recovery when they discover that small camps of survivors have been staked out in secret and welcome other survivors who managed to fight off the infectious rage. Dark Inside is thus concerned with a hypothetical situation in which contemporary systems and constructs of morality break down, suggesting that more localized groups might reemerge which value the reclamation of morals for survival.