How to See in the Dark
by Kathe Koja
It takes a little more than 30 minutes—I just learned this on a moonlight nature walk—30 minutes for the human eye to adjust to the deep ambient darkness that exists beyond city lights, and be able, or start to be able, to distinguish shapes, judge peripheral objects, recognize certain colors, find your way. Without that adjustment we blunder, fall, get turned around, we need to wait for the dark to open our eyes.
Because we forget, we use electricity and batteries and generators to determinedly forget, that darkness is life’s primary medium, it’s what was here before anything else, before the Big Bang and Let there be light. Darkness is primal, it’s the loam and the underground, the night that cradles and heals, it’s what hides the monsters, it’s what hides us from ourselves.
A beta reader pointed out to me that the Dark Factory series keeps expanding outward, from the human-made Dark Factory to the natural Dark Park to, now, the primordial Dark Matter, each book with its own growth and its own resolution, love, confusion, elation, fear. The companion site goes deeper into the meshing, swirling moments of the trilogy and its main characters—Ari Regon’s blazing ascent from wild club kid to global producer, Max Caspar’s inward journey from self-important artist to zen gamer, DJ Felix Perez’s immersion in the beats that literally spin the world, and the ferocious Bunny Graves in her stiletto boots, whom life has taught how to use, and make a weapon of, pain.
And Dark Matter expands and explodes that shining hectic mix of creative genius and cultural collapse and desperate energies, driving to find a way to make a partnership work, a friendship, a marriage, make a music platform work, a game, a life, all of life as everything slides faster and faster not to the end—we’re past all that already—but to a kind of re-beginning even darker. Games? there are games. Gods? there are gods. Violence? one-on-one, yes indeed. Love? so many kinds, surprising, inevitable, bleeding with loss, pulsing with unstoppable joy.
I didn’t expect to be writing a third Dark Factory book—I’ve never seen a major character like Bunny Graves occur so late in a story! But there she was. So there I was, at my desk just like on the nature walk path, keeping my eyes open, allowing the dark to show me everything there was, everything I needed to see.
Kathe Koja’s books include The Cipher, Skin, straydog, Buddha Boy, Velocities: Stories, Under the Poppy, and the Dark Factory trilogy, Dark Factory, Dark Park, and Dark Matter. Her work has won awards, including the Stoker, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the ASPCA’s Henry Bergh Award. She also creates and produces live and online experiences that bring the story directly to you. Find her at kathekoja.com and on IG, FB and Bluesky.
This essay is part of the blog tour for Koja’s new novel; publisher Meerkat Press is also holding an online raffle to win a gift card.