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Okay.. listen to me, I need you to imagine a library, not your cosy neighbourhood library with the squeaky trolley and the friendly librarian who stamps your books with a smile. No! I mean a library with rooms themed by genre, books bound in human skin, wallpaper laced with enough arsenic to make you sick if you stand too close, and a guillotine in the corner that is most definitely not just decorative, that kind of library. That is the Daedalu and The Library After Dark by Ande Pliego locked me inside it and didn't let me go until I'd devoured every last page. IT WAS CREEPY!!!
Aria Stokes is finally feeling settled. Tiny New York apartment, job as a bookseller, and a new relationship with a charming bookstore regular named Jasper. He seems to already know her so well, that last detail felt warm when I first read it. Romantic, even. A man who pays attention, of course, by the time I finished this book, that same detail had flipped entirely on its head. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
As a Valentine's Day surprise, Jasper gets the two of them tickets to an exclusive after-dark tour of the Daedalus Library — the grandiose establishment famed for its immersive genre-based reading rooms and, more notoriously, its rumoured hauntings and here is the thing about Aria, while she normally loves all things ghastly, this place holds more dark secrets than she'd prefer Jasper to know. Like the fact that the last time she was here, she left a body behind. She left a body behind, in a library, on a first date. I put the book down right there and laughed and then immediately picked it back up.
The Daedalus and its infamous manuscript The Dark Hearth Tales are part of a past Aria would rather forget but the prospect of romance beckons, and she accepts — only to find that five other bookworms also have tickets for the evening tour. There's Callum Greene, a Scottish professor. Michelle Baudelaire, a middle-grade fantasy author. Piper Kingston, a journalist. Ruth Howard, a retired nurse and Weston Martinez, a schoolteacher. Strangers, All of them invited to the same exclusive tour, all of them with secrets, because of course they are.
The Daedalus Library is known for its neo-Gothic architecture and for housing the last remaining copy of The Dark Hearth Tales, a controversial collection of 19th-century fairy tales. After Evangeline Riordan, the library's founder and patron, dies under murky circumstances, the library decides to host this exclusive after-hours tour and the ghost of Evangeline hangs over every single scene. Because Aria didn't just know Evangeline. Aria is forced to plumb the depths of an emotionally brutal past while coming to terms with a library she once called home and her relationship with Evangeline a woman she once loved with her whole heart. So this isn't just a horror story. It's a grief story dressed up in poison wallpaper.
When the automatic-door entry malfunctions, Aria, Jasper, and the five other people in their tour group become trapped in the library, forced to venture through its storied rooms and hidden passageways in search of escape and then someone turns up dead, fear and tensions rise as one by one, group members meet gruesome ends in impossibly beautiful reading rooms filled with deadly objects, including toxic wallpaper that sickens Aria and a guillotine that surely isn't just for show. The guillotine. I cannot stress this enough — a functioning guillotine just sitting in a reading room. This library has no health and safety department and I respect that completely.
The story is told from the perspectives of all the characters, and it quickly becomes evident that everyone has secrets. You suspect just about everyone at one point, and as the twists start hitting, it becomes clear no one can be trusted and Pliego weaves the Dark Hearth Tales fairy tales throughout — each fairy tale connects to a character in the real story, so you keep reading the dark folklore and then watching it echo and mirror in what's happening to the tour group. Fairy tales in their nature are grim, and they follow that same formula here in the real story, which gets gruesome at times. It's clever and unsettling in exactly the right measure.
Then the twist that genuinely stopped me mid-breath. Piper is actually the lost granddaughter Eden and Aria's stepsister — the person Aria calls Rory — and she fakes her own death in front of Jasper and Aria. The journalist, faking her own death. After you've already watched other people actually die. The nerve! The audacity! The absolute theatrical commitment of it.
The Daedalus Library is an outright homage to the Winchester House — its twisty, turny, labyrinthine layout designed to disorient, to trap, to confuse and Pliego uses every inch of that architecture. The library is famous for its eccentric collections, including a roomful of books made from human skin and others made with enough arsenic in their inks and dyes to poison a reader. Every room is a new threat, every hallway a new secret. You genuinely feel the walls closing in.
Intricately plotted and unique, the novel seamlessly blends fairy tale, romance, and horror to create a richly textured reading experienc Read it in one sitting if you can.
