All the Colors of the Dark by Chris Whitaker is a literary psychological thriller novel that deals with one man’s lifelong obsession to find a girl. Through it all, this novel explores romance, heartache, sadness, horror, personal loss and most of all, friendship. Where does one even begin to review this novel? Is this a great novel? Absolutely not, in my honest opinion. Did it have the initial pull and allure of being a good novel in the beginning? Yes, absolutely. So where did things go wrong? For one, the characters and premise of the story seem so implausible the further one gets into it. Second, a point that I’m going to have to agree with the many negative reviews is that this novel could have been better served if it were just cut shorter. A lot shorter. These two points sum up why this novel started off great but ultimately failed to be something much greater.

The first obvious thing I’ve noticed, as will many others, is that there are literally 260 chapters in this 600-page novel. This leads to not any one chapter being longer than, say, 7-8 minutes at most. Each will actually either consist of a reading time of either a minute or two to around 3-5 minutes on average. At first, I thought this was ludicrous, but I actually found that I kind of liked this format. While certainly not wanting all novels to be like this, I thought this was a nice change of pace. You see, many quick chapters are sort of like a cheap and maybe even underhanded effect in making the reader believe that they are progressing through the book at a faster pace than normal, maybe even making one think that this is a high-paced novel when, in fact, it is not. It’s like making one feel that this novel is literally a “page-turner.” However, while this method worked in the beginning, it has a much harder time working its magic during the second half of the novel.

So, on to the story itself. Let me begin by saying that we all should be happy if we had a friend like Saint in real life. How believable is her character? Not likely? I have to keep reminding myself that this is a fictional story with fictional characters. The main story regarding Patch wanting to find the missing Grace from boyhood to his adult life is also a bit unbelievable. The author made it plain for us to understand why he’d want to do such a thing, but Patch’s obsession for literally the entire book is, again, hard to fathom as believable. It was hilarious to me that the drama could have been literally solved if she’d just given him her last name and location. But of course, she didn’t want to be found, and yet 90% of the story we need to read about Patch’s journey to find her whereabouts. Unfortunately, this 90% lengthy journey only ushered in a 5% payoff in the end, if that. It was so disappointing. Did it work? I mean, sure, it did. But I couldn’t help but think that if the angle of the story was different instead of focusing entirely on Patch finding Grace, would it have made it better?

Unlike some of the other negative reviews, I didn’t have a hard time following the story or events as they unfolded. It could be that the quick chapters had something to do with some readers having a hard time following along, but each major part of the novel is broken into different years as the story progresses, starting from Saint and Patch’s childhood in the 1960s and ending in the early 2000s. All the Colors of the Dark is, I believe, the first I’ve read from this author. If anything, I hope his other works aren’t like this. While I can forgive and work with the hundreds of chapters, I felt there was just too much word padding to go along with it. There’s no way this novel deserves to be 600 pages. Was there even an editor? At absolute most, I’d say this should have been in the low to mid 300 pages? This made the ending just that much more lackluster because when it came, it just literally came and went where Patch and Grace were concerned. Yeah, I get it, it’s the journey that counts, not the destination, etc., etc. And yet, All the Colors of the Dark just felt like a journey that should have expired sooner had it known what was good for it. Maybe a mini television series would do this story more justice? I can definitely see this story getting picked up by some producer for a mini Hulu or Netflix series.