Down Comes the Night has a very compelling premise: two enemies, standing on opposite sides of an unending war, find themselves miserably trapped with unknowable terrors (and with each other) inside an estate lurking deep in the dark fog-wreathed mountains, and like any trapped thing, they must scrape up answers and fight to the bitter end, together. This is, for the most part, a very successful debut. Down Comes the Night thrives in its themes of heritage and war and power, and in the changing relationship between Wren and Hal, and the two far outshine the sparsely decorated setup and the anemic predictability of the storyline. This is a novel that probes at the nature of what it means to inherit a story of hatred and prejudice and be in perpetual service of it. “War makes monsters out of children,” writes Saft, they live shoulder to shoulder with it and thus grow immune to its atrocities. Wren and Hal, both barely having finished being children, were taught to survive in the vocabularies of violence and monstrousness, and they did not know any other language. Their heady collision precipitates a difficult education, and it is that slow, painful unraveling of received notions and ideas about one another which constitutes the novel’s most rewarding experience. I have to say, however—I am not sure this book lives up to its gothic billing. The story gropes unsuccessfully for the gothic note, but doesn’t fulfill it. Throughout, I found myself longing for the kind of hauntignly evocative atmosphere that Moreno-Garcia crafts so effectively in her gothic charmer, Mexican Gothic, for example. I think my expectations might have simply been exacerbated by the marketing around the book.