Sang Pak had been recommended to me numerous times before I even cracked the cover of Wait Until Twilight, and I was slightly apprehensive that his writing wouldn’t live up to the hype. Luckily, he more than exceeded my expectations. I can safely say that I’m a convert to his dreamy, lyrical prose and true to life characters.

Sixteen-year-old Samuel lives with his father in a small Georgia town where secrets are few and far between. However, Samuel stumbles across a hideous secret that haunts him in his dreams and obsesses him in his waking hours. Three horribly deformed triplets are being hidden by their mother, who believes they were immaculately conceived. Samuel realizes that he must save the triplets from their troubled mother and terrifyingly unhinged older brother, but to do so, he has to first face the monster inside himself.

I don’t think I can sum up the tone of the novel any better than the blurb on the back of the book, which reads:

‘This psychologically complex story of survival and self-determination explores the dark, often contradictory worlds of young contemporary life, laying bare the ugly truths and secrets that haunt us all.’

Samuel’s voice is incredibly strong for a sixteen-year-old boy. On one hand, he’s happy to hang out with his friends and pretend to like the taste of beer; on the other hand, sometimes his inner thoughts are so complex that it’s like reading about somebody years older. Here Samuel tries to reason with the darker side of himself:

‘I just want to do everything I can to bring my reality back together again, anything to forget what I saw…what I did…and get back to normal. Don’t even think about it, I tell myself. It’s over anyway. Keep it normal, I say to myself. Normal. Normal. Normal. No, don’t say it too much or it sounds strange.’