While Apocalypse Now gave me a vague idea of what to expect in the original novella, Heart of Darkness still ended up pleasantly surprising me.

This book can be best summed up with two key words: tension and intensity. Heart of Darkness reads almost like a Gothic horror novel, with a creepy sense of uneasiness and isolation that grows over time.

After narrator Marlowe arrives in Africa, the reader is treated to a continuous series of vignettes showing the brutal reality of slavery and the methods used to keep the ivory trade going. African characters are presented as bestial savages, but the white characters Marlowe encounters are also contemptible without exception. They're brutal thugs, incompetent stuffed shirts, or conniving cheats. They stand in stark contrast to Kurtz, an almost mythical figure spoken of with awe, fear, and jealousy. With mechanical failures and hostile natives, Marlowe's steamboat trip grows more and more hellish and desperate over time, while Kurtz himself becomes even more mysterious and sinister.

Just as this narrative tension reaches its height, we finally come face to face with Kurtz himself. Despite being weakened by illness and insanity, Kurtz is nothing if not intense. Marlowe finds himself horrified by the jungle theocracy Kurtz has set up for himself, but even he can't help being cowed by his charisma and force of will. Marlowe finds himself marked by his brief contact with the man, and left with a decidedly grim view of humanity as a whole.

Literary ClassicsTM are frequently imposing, monumental works, but Heart of Darkness turned out to be an unexpectedly swift read. So much has been made of the book's exploration of the "duality of mankind" that I'd expected a dry, verbose story, but this wasn't the case at all. Instead, the book was engaging throughout, and its exploration of man's inhumanity to man avoided becoming didactic and impenetrable. I found the book to be much more vibrant than the dense, fossilized analysis and criticism that has accreted around it.

This public domain book is available as a free ebook from the Project Gutenberg web site.