My thanks to the team at Midas for inviting me to participate in the blog tour for Greg Mosse’s debut novel The Coming Darkness. I’m delighted to share my review today.

The Coming Darkness was published by Moonflower on 10th November 2022 and is available for purchase through the links here.

The Coming Darkness

Paris, 2037. Alexandre Lamarque of the French external security service is hunting for eco-terrorists. Experience has taught him there is no one he can trust – not his secretive lover Mariam, not even his old mentor, Professor Fayard, the man at the centre of the web. He is ready to give up. But he can’t.

In search of the truth, Alex must follow the trail through an ominous spiral of events, from a string of brutal child murders to a chaotic coup in North Africa. He rapidly finds himself in a heart-thumping race against chaos and destruction. He could be the world’s only hope of preventing THE COMING DARKNESS . . .

My Review of The Coming Darkness

Alex has a new mission.

The Coming Darkness is quite a book and I’m not certain my limited intellect coped with every facet of this rich, engaging and absolutely blistering narrative!

Intricately plotted, I found I had to concentrate hard on retaining who was who and how the various aspects were interrelated in the story. I’d say The Coming Darkness is not a book to read in short blasts. It needs, and deserves, sustained concentration fully to appreciate how interconnected the different strands are and I think it best for readers to immerse themselves completely. Greg Mosse’s style is skilfully eloquent and I loved the balance of exposition to short pithy dialogue because it drives the narrative forward with rapidity and tension. This is intelligent writing.

Short chapters create a fast paced, episodic style. Indeed, the seemingly fragmentary, and yet totally interconnected, plotting has all the hallmarks of a film or television series that would garner cult status. It’s so difficult to define, but I found The Coming Darkness thrums with menace so that I felt unnerved and tense most of the time I was reading it.

I thought the near future setting was pitch perfect. With reference to aspects like viruses, reliance on technology, cultish terrorism and the unsettling desire for some to control and dominate others, Greg Mosse has put his finger right on the pulse of modern life in an authentic manner. I found the Parisian setting particularly effective because it was simultaneously familiar and unusual. This means that although The Coming Darkness is slightly futuristic, it is entirely plausible and disturbing.

In amongst the big themes and global aspects, what resonated so beautifully was Alex’s relationship with his mother and with Mariam. Through this strand the author gives hope and humanity, illustrating the human ability to love and to care in amongst the greed, the desire for power, and the need to for dominance. I’m hoping The Coming Darkness will not be the last we see of Alexandre Lamarque.

Terrifying, taut and prescient The Coming Darkness might be one of the most disturbing thrillers I’ve read in years because Greg Mosse manages to blend all the potential terrors of the world into an enthralling and convincing story that could just happen very, very soon.

About Greg Mosse

A theatre director, playwright and actor Greg Mosse is the founder and director of the Criterion New Writing programme at the Criterion Theatre in London, running workshops in script development to a diverse community of writers, actors and directors. In addition, since 2015, Greg has written, produced and stage 25 plays and musicals.

Greg set up both the Southbank Centre Creative Writing School – an open access program of evening classes delivering MA level workshops – and the University of Sussex MA in Creative Writing at West Dean College which he taught for 4 years.

The husband of the bestselling novelist Kate Mosse, Kate’s hit novel Labyrinth was inspired by a house that Greg and his mother bought together in the French medieval city of Carcassonne, where the couple and their children spent many happy summers. Following the success of Labyrinth, Greg created the innovative readers-and-writers website mosselabyrinth.co.uk MosseLabyrinth. The first of its kind MosseLabrynth was the world’s first online accessible 3D world, and the inspiration for Pottermore – the popular Harry Potter website.

A multilinguist, Greg has lived and worked in Paris, New York, Los Angeles and Madrid and has worked as both an interpreter at a variety of international institutions and a teacher in the UK.

Greg and Kate live in Chichester, where Kate’s parents founded the Chichester Festival Theatre, they have two grown up children.

The Coming Darkness was written during lockdown and is Greg’s debut novel.

For further information, visit Greg’s website, or follow him on Twitter @GregMosse. You’ll also find him on Instagram and Facebook.

There’s more with these other bloggers too: