The Infinite Velvet Dark - A Review

Open Shelf recently read The Infinite Velvet Dark by Denis Evans. Here's our review.

The Infinite Velvet Dark is available HERE.

The opening chapter drops the reader straight into a grimy, neon-soaked chase through a collapsing cityscape, and it’s immediately clear that the author has a gift for atmosphere. It is an early standout sequence: frantic, claustrophobic, and beautifully chaotic. The city feels hostile in a way that’s never overstated, just relentlessly, quietly dangerous.

The world feels bleak, lived-in, and unapologetically hostile, yet the details are never over-explained, and it’s a choice that works beautifully. The setting emerges through texture rather than exposition: mould-furred air-con units, rain-slick parapets, half-dead advertising murals, and stairwells that seem to resent being used. It’s a strong, confident way to introduce a dystopian environment.

The writing is at its best when it leans into that sensory overload with the clatter of boots, the throb of adrenaline and the suffocating hum of the city below. There’s a real kinetic energy to the chase, and the author clearly enjoys building tension through physicality and claustrophobic detail.

The core strengths are undeniable: a vivid setting, a strong sense of danger, and a protagonist whose desperation feels real. This is a world that’s falling apart in fascinating ways, and the author trusts the reader to keep up, a refreshing approach in a genre that often over-explains itself.

The opening chapters of this work continue to deliver a gripping, atmospheric descent into a world where survival is a negotiation, debt is destiny, and the city itself seems to breathe with exhausted resignation. What stands out immediately is the author’s bleak, immersive worldbuilding, a talent that gives these early chapters a cinematic, almost tactile quality. Rather than pausing to explain its dystopia, the book lets the reader feel it. Those rain-slick stairwells are joined by neon haze, cracked screens, and the rhythmic suffocation of overcrowded transit. These details accumulate into a setting that feels authentic. The restraint gives the narrative a confident, mature tone. The book shifts from physical danger to systemic danger, and this is where the writing truly shines. Elias’s journey through debt, certification, and the quiet machinery of exploitation is rendered with a clarity that’s both understated and devastating. These are human stories in a harsh system. The author has a gift for capturing the emotional weight of bureaucracy, how a single line on a screen can change a life, how a polite smile can mask a trap, how a working lift can feel like a luxury. The municipal housing sequence is particularly powerful. The simple miracle of a window that opens, a room with no assigned purpose, a key with a space for a name. These moments land with surprising emotional force. They’re small, but they matter, and the book knows exactly how to make them resonate.

As we continue there are a number of vivid and memorable set-pieces. The chapters present sharply drawn vignettes, with scenes almost feeling like short films. It’s a style that lends itself to a futuristic dystopia, the story punching time after time, keeping the reader alert. The effect is striking: a mosaic of moments that collectively build a portrait of a man trapped in a system far larger than himself.

The prose is dense, sensory, and deeply committed to its world. The author’s voice has a distinctive rhythm, delivering urgency in the action sequences, contemplation in the quieter ones. Even when the narrative moves quickly between scenes, the emotional throughline remains strong: Elias’s exhaustion, his stubbornness, his flickers of hope, and the quiet tragedies of the people around him.

There are stylistic quirks and a looping return to certain emotional beats, but they contribute to the book’s unique cadence. The repetition feels intentional, echoing the grinding cycles of Elias’s life, and the structure gives the prose a breathless, lived-in quality.

There are also some diversions along the way. One section, an interlude, looks at Art and is one of the more emotionally resonant passages. After chapters of galaxies and dead worlds, the reader is returned to the ground-level reality of the city. This offers a powerful contrast. The shift is subtle allowing us to know that while Elias is drifting through the universe, the people left behind are still navigating the grinding machinery of everyday life.

The revelation that “there is no procedure for a man like Elias going missing” is delivered with quiet, devastating clarity. It’s not cruelty, and everyone Art speaks to is polite, sympathetic, even helpful, but the system simply has no space for someone who never existed in its records. The novel excels at showing how bureaucracy shapes human experience, and this section distils that theme into its purest form.

The waiting room scene is especially affecting: a man sitting still for twenty minutes, holding the weight of a truth he already knew but needed to hear aloud.

Art’s determination to believe Elias “got out” is rendered with tenderness rather than denial. The absence of a body becomes a fragile kind of hope, something he clings to the way one holds a rail on a moving Lev. It’s a beautifully understated portrayal of loyalty, grief, and the human need to keep a door open, even when the hallway behind it is dark.

The emotional centre of this section is Janik. His simple, earnest question, “When’s your friend coming back to see us?” lands with extraordinary force. It’s a moment that doesn’t need embellishment; the ache is already there. Art’s repeated answer, “soon,” becomes one of the novel’s most poignant refrains. It’s not false hope, it is kindness, offered in the only form he can manage.

For all its observation of dystopian unpleasantness, there is heartbreaking humanity waiting in the wings. It provides an anchor to the cosmic narrative, real human stakes reminding the reader that, even in a universe full of wonder, personal experiences are the most powerful, especially when it concerns absence. This story arc provides a deep emotional balance to the dystopian grit.

You can find The Infinitie Velvet Dark HERE.

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