All the Colors of the Dark: A Reckoning with Chris Whitaker’s Unruly Epic

We’re two months deep into 2025, and I’m looking back on some of my favorite reads of the past year, the books that left me reeling, raw, and desperate for another hit. With his latest, Chris Whitaker has done it again—dragged us through the muck and madness of human frailty and spit us out somewhere between revelation and exhaustion. All the Colors of the Dark isn’t just a novel—it’s an assault, a baptism, a brutal symphony of trauma, redemption, and the unrelenting passage of time.

The premise is relatively straightforward, if not familiar. 1975. A nowhere town in Missouri. Girls are vanishing like whispers in a cyclone. Enter Patch, a one-eyed kid who becomes a hero by accident and a martyr by design. His act of courage, a reckless stab at salvation, locks him into a decades-long dance with ghosts, self-destruction, and the inescapable orbit of Saint, the only person in his world who refuses to let him sink. It should be a mystery. A thriller. A detective story. But it’s not. It’s something bigger and stranger—an elegy to lost youth and squandered dreams.

Whitaker’s prose is immersive, pulling you deep into the sticky heat of the Ozarks, the stench of regret, the quiet horror of a town that lets its children slip through the cracks. It’s lyrical, hypnotic, and occasionally bloated enough to make you wish for a machete to hack through the overgrowth. The middle drags—too enamored with its own story to realize it’s lost the thread. But when Whitaker strikes, he hits hard. The final stretch is a hell of a thing—blood, revelation, and a long-overdue reckoning that leaves the reader gasping for air.

Then there’s Patch. The wounded poet. The one-eyed enigma. A man haunted by the weight of heroism he never asked for. Whitaker walks a tightrope with him—at times magnetic, at others frustratingly inert. Everyone loves Patch, adores him, follows him with blind loyalty, which, after a while, starts to feel like a con. But Saint? Saint is the fire, the engine, the guts of this whole damn thing. She’s the sheriff of justice in a lawless town, the anchor to Patch’s drifting ship. If the book had any real justice, she’d be the one leading the charge instead of orbiting Patch’s self-destruction.

Here’s the rub: All the Colors of the Dark is an ambitious, unruly beast of a novel, swollen with grief, hope, and the grime of real life. It flirts with greatness but loses itself in the excess. Whitaker wants it to be everything at once—a thriller, a romance, a coming-of-age epic, a meditation on trauma. And in that ambition, it sometimes stumbles under its own weight. But when it soars, when it grabs you by the collar and drags you into its violent, aching heart, it’s undeniable.

Would I recommend it? That depends. If you want a clean, tight mystery, this isn’t it. But if you’re willing to strap in for a raw, unflinching ride through the darkness of the American soul, then by all means—take the plunge. Just be prepared to stagger out the other side, dazed and uncertain, wondering whether you survived it or if it simply swallowed you whole.