1,001 Novels: A Library of America
The Darkest Child (2005)
by Delores Phillips
Cassville, Georgia
Georgia 5/26
The Darkest Child is a real cabinet of horrors, about a light-skinned African American prostitute and her brood of 10 children, written from the perspective of one of the daughters. It is a one-off by an author who never wrote another novel, I'm assuming based on that fact, that this was a thinly veiled work of auto-fiction. If it wasn't, it is an incredibly fucked up work of imagination, if only because large portions of the plot revolve around the Mom forcing her various, very underage daughters, including the narrator, into acts of prostitution with men from the town. Mom is, as one would expect, both mentally ill and a substance abuser- she is frequently depicted clawing invisible bugs from her face in times of distress.
Anyway. I thought The Darkest Child was dark, indeed.
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