Literary Review

Review: 'A Fix of Light' by Kel Menton

Between shadow and daybreak, a world where pain and beauty collide

Neil Czeszejko

05 May 2025 — 2 min read

The wording of A Fix of Light, when reduced to its four-word title, carries the suggestion of serenity. Yet it’s precisely the tale’s complete subversion of this softness that haunts: a depiction of darkness, both physical and cerebral, that's as clawing and restless as any beast we wrestle with to stay among the living.

Though marketed for a younger audience, the story resonates most where battles with self-doubt and isolation emerge—struggles we later recognise as universal, even if adulthood dulls their sharpest edges. In truth, A Fix of Light is a tale of wide, though demanding, appeal.

Its challenge lies in confronting the absurdities of suffering, inflicted on both body and psyche. This is a dark narrative, as heavy and urgent as any plea for empathy echoing across headlines.

Shadows seep between the lines and gnaw at their margins, starved for quiet devastation, much like the terrors swarming the protagonist’s mind and the love interest’s childhood memories.

Here, horror and romance merge into something new: a fantasy woven with ominous, biting Gaelic folklore, where transition and transformation touch every shape—real or once thought unimaginable.

Nothing in A Fix of Light is diluted for palatability: not the language, which shivers with poetic intensity, nor the lives it holds, harrowed by torments many face even without the grief of nightmares made flesh.

This is a story for the modern teenager, sceptical of moral lessons from those blind to the turmoil within, and for any adult willing to let the world, in all its shrouded darkness, in.

It’s a tale for those capable of seeing, not merely looking—a tale as heart-rending as any we flinch from when it demands pure, unadulterated compassion. And yet, its light offers honeyed relief, and its beauty a stillness we can breathe deeply.

The narrative provides no easy answers or false comforts but invites us to sit with the complexities of the human spirit: the contradictions, the suffering, the quiet triumphs. Its beauty is not in spite of its pain, but because of it, for within the most brutal moments lies the potential for profound understanding.

This is not merely a story to read; it's one to experience—an exploration of the tensions between shadow and illumination, where even in the deepest, most labyrinthine despair, a flicker of becoming awaits.

In this way, A Fix of Light asks us not only to witness but to feel, to see beyond the surface, and to embrace the weight and wonder of the world as it truly is.

An advance copy was provided by Publisher Spotlight and Little Island Books.