📖 How Bad Things Can Get by Darcy Coates
🌕 Trauma, terror, and a terrifying island legacy in this chilling cult-horror survival thriller.
Pre-Reading Thoughts
I've read enough Darcy Coates to know that atmosphere is her superpower — whether it’s a haunted house or a forest that breathes wrong, she always delivers the creeping dread. So the idea of her writing a book about cult trauma and social media excess on a cursed island? I basically ran to read this, flashlight and emotional preparedness in hand.
Post-Reading
As I thought...
The atmosphere is thick — you can practically feel the humid air, the uneasy quiet, and the way the shadows press in. Prosperity Island feels like it’s watching you. The cult backstory is handled with surprising sensitivity, but Coates never lets you get comfortable. Even the moments of calm feel like the eye of a storm.
It surprised me by...
…how fast it went from unsettling to utterly gripping. Around the halfway point I had that exact moment: “Nope, I’m not sleeping until I know how this ends.” I needed answers — not just about the disappearances, but about the main character herself, and whether she was going to be able to break free from the story she’s been living in for twenty years.
The themes hit hard: legacy, memory, and whether we’re doomed to repeat the past just because it’s carved into our bones. But don’t worry — there are also blood sacrifices and possibly sentient islands.
🎵 MUSIC PAIRING
🎵 Featured Song: “Bury a Friend” – Billie Eilish
Dark, twitchy, and crawling under your skin. That strange whispery menace perfectly mirrors the vibe on the island and inside the protagonist’s head.
🎶 Vibe Album: The Turning: Official Soundtrack – Various Artists
Moody, modern gothic, with a constant undercurrent of dread. It hits the same eerie nerves as this book — especially tracks like “The Brume” and “Mother.”
🎧 Artist Recommendation: Chelsea Wolfe
If Prosperity Island had a house band, it’d be her. Haunting, atmospheric, and always one breath away from a scream.
🎨 VIBE CHECK
A colour palette: Slashed crimson, decaying gold, seaweed green
A soundtrack: A mix of wave sounds and distant screaming
A season: Summer — but the wrong kind. Muggy, haunted, untrustworthy.
A mood: “I should leave, but I can’t.”
A scent: Salt, mildew, old blood, and sunscreen that no longer feels comforting
🃏 TAROT PULL
The 6 of Cups – from the Dark Wood Tarot
This version of the card is shadowy, with ghost white lilies and a crow peeking from behind trees — an image of nostalgia that’s turned just a little bit rotten. That’s exactly what this book plays with: childhood memories, trauma, and the illusion that the past is safely behind us.
The 6 of Cups is often about memory, but in the Dark Wood it warns us that memory can be a trap. And on Prosperity Island, what’s buried never stays buried for long.
For fans of:
📚 The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward
📚 My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones
📺 The Wilds meets Midsommar, with a bit of Yellowjackets thrown in for good measure
