SOURCE: Toíbín, Colm. “A House Full of No One.” London Review of Books 19, no. 3 (6 February 1997): 3, 5-6.

In the following review, Tóibín offers a mixed assessment of This Wild Darkness.

Harold Brodkey died of AIDS in January 1996; Oscar Moore died in September 1996. Brodkey wrote about his illness for the New Yorker; Moore for the Guardian. Obviously, when they wrote their articles neither of them knew when they would die, but since each article is dated, it is now possible for the reader of these two books to know how long they have left, and there is a stark, urgent edge to their accounts of what it is like to live with AIDS. They mean what they are saying, and while there is a certain comfort in the fact that both of them are so brave in the face of illness and death, and so determined...