Darkness: Seeing Trouble Is Not Enough
Pavliuk’s thriller asks why obvious distress fails to prompt action, and why the investigator has ways to retreat of his own.
At the beginning of I See You’re Interested in Darkness, the adults have very little to do: approach a girl standing alone at a bus stop and take her hand. Instead, they argue about who should do it. The child stands there at night while help stalls at “why me?”
That scene establishes a more precise theme for Illarion Pavliuk’s novel than the promise of a disturbing investigation alone. Danger comes from more than someone intending harm. It also grows wherever an ordinary act is continually passed to someone else.
Criminal psychologist Andriy Haister arrives in Buskiv Sad, where there is a serial killer and a missing child. You can read to discover who is responsible. The stronger question is why obvious distress fails to become a sufficient reason to act.
Seeing is not yet helping
Speaking to the missing Nadia’s mother, Haister says he has come to help find her and the others. He immediately corrects himself internally: he meant finding the killer. The two tasks seem close, but are not identical for him. Investigating a crime can remain a professional assignment. Searching for a particular child means letting her matter.
Her name catches him personally: he remembers his little sister Nadiyka, who died as a child. The missing girl stops being a line in a case file. At the same time, he wishes he did not know her name and would not be present when she is found.
Pavliuk complicates the familiar division between indifferent locals and a good expert from the capital. Haister has his own ways of retreating. An ability to notice connections does not guarantee a willingness to bear the consequences of noticing them.
That makes the novel more interesting than an instruction to care. It shows how refusal can sound reasonable: this is not my responsibility; the chances are poor; someone else is more competent; another task is more urgent. Such statements are not necessarily lies. What is frightening is their accumulation into an order where nobody does even what is possible.
Darkness works through everyday life
Buskiv Sad holds attention through more than secrets. Its everyday life contains authority, fear of embarrassment and dependence on other people’s decisions. In one scene, a local officer explains rushed work by saying a local superior could not be reached. That superior’s displeasure is enough to get people moving.
This contrasts with the mother’s report that nobody is searching for Nadia anymore. The novel distributes urgency unevenly: danger does not always receive a response, but power requires an immediate one. Fear has an address; help can get lost between recipients.
Pavliuk combines this with strange appearances, disturbances in perception and the grotesque. Reading Buskiv Sad as a documentary portrait of a Ukrainian settlement would be a mistake. It is a constructed world where the detective story gradually demands another way of reading. Every detail need not satisfy the realism of a police report.
Why read it now?
For a reader in Ukraine in 2026, there is a recognisable question about responsibility: what happens between “I know” and “I will act”? The novel does not establish that Ukrainian society is indifferent or explain the current war. An invented settlement is not a sample; its inhabitants’ behaviour is not statistics.
The book offers something else. It keeps readers in the uncomfortable space where knowing about distress is insufficient, and helping requires abandoning a convenient explanation for inaction. That experience does not expire with technology or a publication date.
Its darkness may still be unsuitable for you now. Violence, danger to children, suicide and psychologically difficult scenes are sufficient reasons to postpone it. Nobody has to prove they care by enduring a difficult novel.
Read it whole, or leave it for later
Read it in full if you want a thriller whose investigation changes both the meaning of events and your view of its protagonist. Selective reading works poorly: clues, repetitions and later reassessments depend on sequence. An account can convey the theme without providing that experience.
Leave it for later if you want comfort, a short plot or a strictly realistic detective story. The novel is expansive and builds pressure gradually; its grotesque elements and shifts in register may irritate as much as fascinate.
Without revealing the resolution, its shortest thought is this: evil has more room wherever everyone can explain why helping should be someone else’s job.
Sources and limits
Ілларіон Павлюк, Я бачу, вас цікавить пітьма, Ukrainian text, The Old Lion Publishing House. The reading covers the opening, Haister’s conversation with Halia, his personal history, scenes involving local authority and the ending. The final resolutions are not disclosed. This is literary interpretation, rather than psychological diagnosis or research into Ukrainian society. The English title is a rendering for this page; the source edition is Ukrainian.