The Darkening Sky by Hugh Greene - REVIEW
Some novels creep up on you. Others knock politely. And then there are those rare creatures that slip through the back door of your mind, settle themselves comfortably, and begin rearranging the furniture without asking permission. The Darkening Sky, written under a pseudonym, Hugh Greene, is firmly in that category: a psychological thriller that understands the unconscious with unnerving precision… unsurprising, given its author spent more than three decades professionally exploring the human psyche.
Greene is not simply a writer toying with darkness. This is the second of his novels I’ve reviewed, Murder and Malice being the other, even though The Darkening Sky is in fact the earlier of the two. The pattern is unmistakable: he writes with the authority of someone who has lived several lives. An internationally published doctor, a long-time consultant to government agencies, the army and police forces, and a scholar who has studied, taught and researched at at least four academic institutions, he brings a depth that seeps quietly into every scene. He knows how people break — and even more compellingly, how they behave just before they do.
The story opens in Liverpool, not the postcard version but the city’s drab, haunted underside, where the Royal Liverpool Hospital squats like a brutalist guardian over land that once held medieval healing springs. That symbolic layering — ancient solace buried beneath modern concrete — is classic Greene. Into this labyrinth comes a barefoot stranger, soaked, silent and terrified. He asks for only one man: Dr Power. Then, with a kind of dreadful simplicity, he adds, “Tell him it’s beginning.” Greene understands that fear is at its most potent when it speaks quietly.
Dr Carl Power, the man summoned by this mystery, enters the novel with the reassuring competence of someone who appears to have his life almost, but not quite, under control. Recently appointed as a consultant psychiatrist, owner of a gracious home above Cheshire’s mystical Alderley Edge, and partner to Eve, an artist whose portraits seem to reveal more than they conceal, Power has assembled a life of civility and balance. Naturally, it is a life waiting to be unsettled.
Greene allows the unease to accumulate. A simple walk in the forest becomes disconcerting when Power encounters a ragged figure calling himself the Piper, a flute-playing eccentric who seems to know far too much. A dinner with Eve, cooked with sensual care by a man who seeks beauty and control in equal measure, begins warmly but develops fractures beneath the conversation. Eve, who paints symbols into her subjects’ likenesses, mirrors Power’s own psychological complexities; their affection is deep, their misunderstandings equally so.
Running beside Power’s measured existence is the novel’s second thread: the world of the New Age convoy camped in the woods below his home. Greene does not caricature them; he observes them with the same clinical clarity he brings to hospitals and universities. Their world is chaotic, brutal, intoxicating, and governed by dangerous hungers. Through Siân, a teenage runaway seduced by the promises of a charismatic stranger, we witness a very different kind of descent. Not the quiet anxieties of a consultant’s dining room, but the raw lure of risk, belonging and manipulation. The scenes between Siân and the stranger are among the novel’s most chilling — not for their violence, but for their emotional accuracy. Greene writes predators the way only someone with decades of professional and investigative experience can.
What’s most striking is how physically close these two worlds are. Power’s elegant home lies only a short walk from the caves where Siân’s story twists into darkness. Yet socially and psychologically, the distance is immense. Greene suggests, with quiet conviction, that civilisation is far thinner than we like to imagine. Often it is no more than a single path, a wall, or a moment of choice.
And always, hanging over the narrative, is that cryptic phrase: “It’s beginning.” Greene refuses to explain it too soon. Instead he allows it to simmer, acquiring new shades of meaning as the story deepens. Is something rising from the past? Is someone slipping into delusion? Or — most unsettling of all — could both be true? The novel occupies the threshold between folklore and psychiatry, inviting the reader to look into the dark without offering reassurance.
What truly elevates the novel is how fully its characters take hold. Dr Power is one of those rare protagonists who feels lived-in rather than constructed — rational, flawed, and quietly compelling. Eve is equally memorable, her artistic intuition echoing the book’s atmospheric undercurrents, while Siân’s trajectory is both disturbing and heartbreakingly believable. The ending, when it arrives, isn’t a loud twist but a gathering of shadows that feels both inevitable and satisfying. It left me with the rare sensation of wanting to continue — not because anything was missing, but because Greene has built a world and cast I’m now deeply invested in.
What stands out most in The Darkening Sky is its refusal to resort to gimmickry. There are no cheap twists, no melodramatic villains, no final-chapter theatrics. The danger expands slowly and inexorably, shaped by atmosphere, character and psychological tension. The humour, when it appears, is quiet and dry — the sort you hear in hospital corridors at three in the morning, when things are simultaneously too bleak and too absurd not to laugh.
Greene writes with clarity, intelligence and a professional intimacy with the human condition. His understanding of police procedure, hospital culture, interpersonal fear and mythic symbolism intertwines seamlessly. Few thrillers manage to be both intellectually engaging and genuinely unsettling without leaning on spectacle; this one does. It respects the reader, trusting them to notice what is whispered rather than shouted.
Most of all, the novel lingers. The characters, the shifting psychological weather, the uneasy border between civility and chaos — these remain long after the final page. The Darkening Sky is a reminder of how porous the boundary is between the rational world and the one that waits beneath it.
A beautifully atmospheric, psychologically rich thriller, perfect for readers who enjoy mystery, depth, and a quiet touch of something ancient moving just out of sight. I’m looking forward to reading the other books in the series.
