3 out of 5

Dark Ride starts rather insouciantly, with slacker “Hardly” pulling up to a municipal building, narrating us to his waiting inside to delay the payment on some tickets; writer Lou Berney perfectly sets our expectations low for the character – actually named Hardy, har har – by sketching out his days of getting stoned at home and working evenings as a scarer at an amusement park. And then Hardly spots two kids, waiting for a parent, and spots signs of what he believes to be physical abuse. When their mother comes back to fetch the kids, clearly trying to hide some telltale marks, it affirms for Hardly what he saw. His slacker brain tries to cycle through appropriate steps and is stymied: there’s no security guard around; no one at the municipal building will help him out. The image nags him enough to report what he saw to Child Protection Services, but setting aside a poor experience there – overburdened, uninterested workers – he doesn’t have any concrete details to provide.

So Hardly slowly, surely steps outside of his stoner days and stress-free nights to find out more. And once he finds out more, he realizes he wants to do more…

Berney’s book is taglined as “a thriller,” but that’s rather misleading. Its charm is in its relative realism, and real life often isn’t very thrilling; every opportunity where a character in a more generic book would find a clue or have a sudden revelation which would take them to the next link in a mystery chain doesn’t happen here. Rather, Hardly is truly starting from square one, and proceeds as, I think, many of us would, with average internet skills and asking uninvolved friends “what do you think?” open-ended questions. And humorously, when we do get to those points where Generic Book would provide those clues, Berney winks at the reader by offering up something incredibly unhelpful instead. It’s a very fun way to break the case, and Hardly remains in character throughout – his progress feels achievable.

But there’s some stuff left on the table. Some stuff about Hardly’s assumptions about these children, and their mother and father, which Berney glances at but doesn’t do much with, and this gives the text a scent of red herring that feels… accidental. I understand that it might not’ve been within Hardly’s nature to interrogate more, but it also feels like there was a lot of dramatic potential there to exploit, and Dark Ride is, for better or worse, written to be a breezy read, and try not to go too far over 200 pages. Evaluating the book at that level, it’s very successful; and, again, it’s impressive that Berney does that without having to fall back on actual Big Stakes thrills.

Until, y’know, he does. The last section of the book needfully has to make some bigger leaps to get us to a semi-explosive conclusion, and it lets us more clearly see the fans generating the breeziness of the read – that is, it’s easier to sense Berney manipulating the story and characters to ramp things up. It still reads well, and takes things to a contextually satisfying conclusion, but we lose some sense of Hardly and the other main roles, relegating the book to something entertaining if ultimately forgettable.