Literary Review

Review: 'A Light From the Nether' by Molly Dowd Sullivan

Where longing distorts reality, and reality distorts the self

Neil Czeszejko

27 May 2025 — 2 min read

Sullivan’s A Light From the Nether is a rare feast: part police procedural, part psychological thriller, with the whole of it folded into urban fantasy, body horror, mystery, dark comedy, and historical fiction. And yet, beneath it all pulses a queer love story—one that defies time, form, and the bounds of emotional complexity.

The novel resists easy allegiance. It conjures a world where ambiguity and immateriality are not side effects but the very structure of existence. Here, the torments of the mind become flesh, and existential questions of right, wrong, and mortality seep into every gesture.

Throughout, tight, evocative language weaves sensory mindscapes that consume and subvert, splintering perception as they unwind. In a world where you hear with your eyes and taste with your touch, anything proves possible.

This is partly due to the grammar of reality Sullivan constructs. Where language not only reflects but remakes the world, Liam, our protagonist, is left shifting between brutalised psyches in a relentless effort to help them heal.

Faced with loss and horror greater than anything he’s known before, he begins to feel his own mind slipping into an essence not entirely his. Still, nothing compares to what comes next: a becoming that undoes all else.

At its heart, A Light From the Nether is a story of life, trauma, adoration, and survival, told with uncanny precision, rhythm, and emotional depth. Empathy walks alongside disdain. Devotion stares at its mirror reflection: desolation.

This is no fairy tale. Emotion here fractures as easily as it soothes, unmaking the self while clinging to it. To enter this world unguarded is to let the narrative strike at full force. For every turn of the plot, there’s a new layer of darkness—aching, immersive, and laced with revelation.

Those seeking romance should turn instead to the slow excavation of the bodies that hold it; those hungry for horror should open themselves up to a tenderness that slashes and wounds.

A Light From the Nether asks you to shed your assumptions and, perhaps, a few hours of sleep. Dreamlike in places, nightmarish in others, it consumes and reconfigures from the inside out. There is nothing left to do but submit to the devourment.

An advance copy was provided by Wendelton Press.