Audiobook - Dark Shadows: The Lucifer Gambit

Susan Omand creeps into the ever darker shadows of Collinsport with her review of this very creepy tale from Big Finish...

Amy Jennings, a minor character in the previous Dark Shadows stories, gets her own story in this longer tale. After Amy has another bad dream, seeing her brother dead and her getting locked up in the local asylum, her friend Carolyn Stoddard and the new sheriff, Jim Hardy, try to calm her down.

Amy explained that she had two brothers, Tom, who died a long while ago and Chris, who was the fiancé of Sabrina, whose story I heard in the last Dark Shadows. Chris got killed and it was Amy who found the body. The Sheriff agrees to have another look into the case and leaves while Carolyn goes for more brandy to calm Amy's nerves. While she is alone, the phone rings. It is a man called Dominic Randall who is looking to speak to Professor T Eliot Stokes about a private matter. Amy tells him Prof Stokes is out of the country, in Cairo, and Dominic tells her his life is at stake and asks if she believes in pure evil. Carolyn makes her hang up the phone but by now Amy's interest is piqued so, the next day, she goes over to the Professor's cottage and finds out some more about the mysterious Mr Randall and his recently deceased wife, Isobel, who died in an unusual fire. Amy heads to Saratoga Springs to meet with Dominic Randall to see if there is anything he knows that will help in her quest to find out what happened to her brother.

On the train she chats to the conductor, who compliments her on her necklace, and asks about the Randalls. Isobel Randall, much older than her husband Dominic, was a high powered business woman who used to be known as The Witch of Wall Street. Arriving at the manor by taxi the driver notes that the windows are all blacked out but that Mr Randall still lived there. As she goes to knock, there's a blood curdling scream for help from inside and Amy breaks in to help him. As she does so she meets.... something. Something demonic and scary, something that is after Dominic, and now her, something that needs the daylight to come in. What is the thing? How do they get rid of it? And is Amy really safe in the dark with Dominic?

At over an hour, this had more time to develop into a much darker tale than the others that I've listened to so far. Essentially it is a battle of good and evil without either of them being absolutely one thing or the other. Isobel makes a really formidable manifestation of evil, Dominic was suitably creepy in pursuit of an eventual goal and, with the use of black magic, I found the story a lot more psychological and disturbing than the others but at the same time it was very enjoyable. I get the feeling it's also setting up for another storyline as there was such a lot of plot furthering dialogue in what was essentially a three handed story, especially in the second part, rather than the action and adventure and larger cast of the other stories. And the final twist at the end of the meeting on the train... there's a lot to come yet.

And that tune from a few episodes ago is back if you listen for it...

Image - Big Finish.