The Other Side of Dark

The 2010 novel The Other Side of Dark is a middle-grade mystery with supernatural details. Written by Sarah Smith, the story follows two teens in the present as they attempt to piece together the history of a Boston house built by a prosperous slave trader in the eighteenth century (the real-life Pinebank Mansion, demolished in 2007, but which this book imagines differently). Narrated by each of the protagonists, in turn, the story often switches between their two very different perspectives: a mixed-race young man who is pragmatic but self-doubting, and a white young woman who is literally and figuratively haunted by the dead.

A few years ago, fifteen-year-old Katie Mullens became orphan after losing both of her parents. She now lives with her stepfather, a teacher at her high school. Although he has started to move on from her mother’s death enough to tentatively date a fellow teacher, Katie has never recovered from her grief. At school, her depressed demeanor has given her a reputation for being a loner. Recently, kids have been calling her “Crazy Katie” – and with good reason. Ever since her mother’s death, Katie has been able to see and hear dead people – both the recently dead and those who died many years ago. Usually, they are not at peace, instead, surrounded by images of whatever horrible things ended their lives. Every day, she checks her house stairs to avoid the ghost of a man swinging from his self-made noose, but she has never been able to contact the one person whom she would most like to talk to: her mother.

Katie’s main way of keeping sane is drawing. Very talented, she has always carried around a sketchbook. Now, she mostly draws the images the dead send her – disturbing images of dark and bloody deaths.



One day, as she walks past the Pinebank mansion, a huge dilapidated building, she sees a strangely dressed boy who introduces himself as George Perkins. As the building suddenly looks to Katie as if it’s engulfed in flames, Katie realizes that George is a ghost. He explains that his job is to protect the treasure hidden inside the house at all costs despite the many fires that have ravaged the property.

After Katie draws the boy and the house on her sketchpad, Law Walker, a boy who goes to the same school, approaches her. He has always been mildly intrigued by Katie, despite her bad reputation. When he sees her drawing, he recognizes the house from the many arguments his parents have been having over it recently. Pinebank was built in the 1800s by Thomas Handasyd Perkins, a wealthy slave trader. George Perkins was Thomas Perkins’s grandson, and the treasure he is guarding might be the legendary missing $50 million Perkins Bequest (all of this history comes directly from real life, including the bequest).

Because the building has burned down twice in the last hundred years, and because of its sordid history, the city of Boston wants to tear it down. (This is exactly what happened to the real Pinebank Mansion, which was demolished in 2007 after a lengthy and highly toxic legal challenge from preservationists.) Law’s father, an African-American history professor at Harvard University is writing a book about the Perkins family and has been working hard on the campaign to destroy the mansion. He is horrified by the idea of preserving something built with money made from selling human beings. Law’s mother is a white professor of architectural history who has been advising a preservationist group that would rather keep the house as an example of Boston’s involvement with slavery. Law has always felt caught in the middle between the two of them.



After realizing that his father’s strict stance doesn’t appeal to him, Law starts a website promoting the campaign to save Pinebank. When his father finds out, they argue, and Law tells him that he wants to be an architect when he grows up. Katie illustrates Law’s site with her drawings of the mansion. Soon, what she is seeing and drawing are portraits of slaves in various states of torment. The more the voices of these dead haunt Katie, the more she and Law are committed to finding the treasure George was talking about.

In a climactic moment, Katie enters the Pinebank Mansion alone, facing her fears. Following her visions, she makes her way down to the cellar, where the ghosts of the house’s former slaves suddenly trap her. They scream at her in what at first sounds like cacophony, but soon she is able to discern the voice of each individual person. Using their clues, she finds the box of treasure that George had been guarding – a book that lists each slave by name. As Katie calls out the name of each ghost, he or she is freed from torment because “if you speak a man’s name after his death, his spirit is healed and can go to rest.”

As the novel ends, Katie is no longer haunted by the dead. She finally starts to heal from her grief over her mother’s death, and she and Law are in a loving relationship. Her exploits in the Pinebank Mansion have spread around school, where her reputation for brave daredevil behavior has made her less of an outsider. Law, meanwhile, has accepted himself as someone destined for a future different from his father’s.