Dark Horses by Susan Mihalic

I didn’t know that this disturbing book would be my horror reading for this season. The publisher says intense, but I almost didn’t want to finish a book that seemingly normalized incest. Roan Montgomery’s father has been having sexual relations with her since she was about six years old. She is now fifteen, and she blames herself for accepting this as her lifestyle. Her mother knew, saw Roan as a competitor, and kept the secret. As those who have studied sexual abuse will tell you, it’s all about the secrecy and what the victim fears losing if she tells. In this story, Roan is worried that she will lose access to her beloved horses if she discloses what her father does to her.

Monty Montgomery is an Olympic medal-winning equestrian who runs Rosemont, a well-known horse farm. He controls his horses and staff with great skill and precision. He is training his daughter Roan, who is obviously named after a horse, to be an equestrian in much the same way that he trains his horses and manages his staff. He is the ultimate control freak, seeing Roan as a commodity. He doesn’t allow her to have a cell phone or social media accounts, but he has online accounts in her name. He posts information about her equestrian events and has formulated a public image that he can control. He demands that she have a persona in public. Every time he called her “Darlin,” I almost shrieked aloud.

The dictionary says that if you describe someone as a dark horse, you mean that people know very little about them. Well, Gertrude, the family’s cook, and Eddie, the hired groom for the horses, practically live under the same roof and know very little about what Roan endures regularly. They’ve known Monty, Roan’s father, for much longer and don’t seem to know what he is capable of doing to his daughter. Mihalic and her editors have certainly chosen a title with profound significance. The literal horses in the story are characters—Jasper, Diva, and Vigo and vital to the story; Roan has relationships with each of them, a markedly better relationship with Jasper than with any human. On the first pages of the book, Roan’s classmates refer to her as a horse girl. This is another expression that has taken on layers of meaning in the modern world.

Although her father claims that boys would be a distraction to her training and the reader knows that the father doesn’t want another competitor for her body, Roan becomes attracted to Will Howard, a boy from school. He asks her out on a date, which her father doesn’t allow. It is through Will, her first male friend, that Roan finally learns the difference between compliant and complicit and eventually victimhood. It becomes apparent that this book’s storyline about breeding and riding horses is only surface level. The book is really about the darkness in life.

Susan Mihalic is quite the writer. She angered me with the story’s content and the graphic sex scenes, yet kept me gripped to the last page. I thank her and Simon and Schuster for allowing me a glimpse of this new author by providing an ARC.