It Walks By Night is an awful book that no one should read. This isn’t going to be a roast, because it’s not that kind of awful, but I think the tone of this review has been set. It Walks By Night takes place almost immediately before The Village of Eight Graves and features a fantastic atmosphere involving sleepwalking, a supremely dysfunctional family, and a cursed sword, but wastes it all.
The word that I think best describes It Walks By Night is “sloppy.” There’s a lot of pieces, but they don’t fit together in an interesting or engaging way. For instance, there are several scenes where it’s not clear how they worked temporally or spatially. While there are ways to smooth it over, it seems like bad writing to force me to assume answers to those problems. Many of the plot’s questions are trivialized if a certain person is guilty… and then that person is guilty. The book takes a daring trope in detective fiction and squanders it, because applying trope barely changed anything. Nearly every “interesting” element connected to this trope was either the result of coincidence or could have easily been maintained even without the trope.
The timeline of events leading up to the book seems contradictory and bizarre. When you look at the bits and pieces it seems fine, and if all the events in the backstory took place the current incident makes sense, but when you try to create an actual timeline it quickly falls apart. Essentially, you get a result where event A logically leads to event B, event B logically leads to event C—and event C logically leads to event A. There’s no way to nicely organize them.
Perhaps the best thing I can say about the plot is that it involves headless corpses but doesn’t fully play them straight. It isn’t particularly innovative, but it’s better than that Ellery Queen book.
A mediocre plot is disappointing, but not a crime. What makes It Walks By Night awful is its treatment of women. I’m fine viewing works as products of their time. I can look past minor, outdated elements (such as the weird phrenological descriptions in Ellery Queen novels), and I won’t knock a detective novel just because it’s lacking in strong, nuanced, complex females characters (especially if the characterization in the book as a whole is weak). But It Walks By Night feels outright misogynistic. The female characters have no agency, and exist literally only to be abused and manipulated by the male characters. There’s not one but two female characters who fall in love with their rapist, as well as casual domestic rape.
Of course, I haven’t given any details on the plot, but I don’t think they matter too much. The protagonist’s rich jerk friend asks him to spend the night at his house because weird things that have been going on, murders ensue, yadda yadda yadda. There actually are some intriguing details to the premise, but I don’t feel like going into them when, as I’ve already explained, there’s no payoff.
If the mystery were fantastic, I wouldn’t mind recommending It Walks By Night with a massive caveat. But between the mediocre plot and misogyny, I just can’t see it being worth it for anyone. Unless you feel compelled to read the entire Kindaichi corpus, in which case… just read the other one and pretend you read this one.
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