Things We Do in the Dark

Ruby Reyes is the novel’s antagonist. Hillier gives her correspondingly typical qualities: She is vicious and calculating. For example, the scene in which Ruby deliberately and coolly extinguishes a cigarette on Joey’s shoulder reveals a woman of extraordinary cruelty. Furthermore, she sexually exploits her daughter as bait to secure wealth, social status, and a grand and spacious home.

Nevertheless, Hillier also highlights a backstory for Ruby that draws attention to abuses and racist injustices that she endures. Joey acknowledges as she sorts through the confusion of her mother’s arrest that she admired what Ruby had made of herself and that her mother had done her best, considering where she started. As a first-generation Filipina immigrant with no education or experience, Ruby lives with the intolerance and racism of her adopted Canada. She scrapes to make a living for her daughter. She uses her sexuality to survive. Her own mother struggled to show her love. She grew up without the love and comfort of a family. She has a string of lovers to provide her with comforts, ending with the two-year affair with Charles Baxter, a white man and respected bank president who holds institutionalized power over Ruby.

As the center of the sensational murder trial of her lover of two years, Ruby Reyes is dubbed the “Ice Queen” She becomes fodder for the tabloid press which uses racist stereotypes about the emotional inscrutability of Asian people and the “seductive” nature of Asian woman to construct her “Ice Queen” persona: “the other woman, the seductress, the home-wrecker who’d lured a happily married man away from his wife and family” (81). Her role as a constructed character in the sensational press speaks to the theme of Violent Crime as Entertainment.

Ruby coaches her daughter against her will to reveal Charles Baxter’s molestation publicly on the stand as a strategy for her own defense, which is that she killed Baxter to protect her daughter. Ruby, as her name suggests, is like a cut gem: from afar she may be stunning, but up close the flaws—her moral imperfections—are glaring. Despite her clear vulnerability to sexism and racism in Canadian society, Hillier makes apparent her predatory paranoia and her willingness to harm others to construct the novel’s antagonistic forces.

In the noir murkiness of the novel in which each character resists easy definition and clings to secrets, Hillier uses Drew Malcolm as a moral compass. In a world of moral relativism, he maintains a code of right and wrong; for example, he agrees to marry a woman he does not love because she is pregnant. He is noble and upright. Hillier never portrays his love for Joey/Paris in physical ways—it is presented as nobler and more transcendent. Ruby cannot fathom Drew’s kind of love, “You knew Joey for, what, a couple of years? And you weren’t even fucking her?” (162). His characterization is juxtaposed with the crudeness and cruelty of other characters.

He is, by training, an investigative journalist. He is restless with mysteries and diligent in efforts to bring the guilty to justice and bring accountability to violent crime. His podcast, Things We Do in the Dark, is dedicated to bringing to light high-profile criminal cases and anatomizing them. Nevertheless, his podcast speaks to the theme of violent crime as entertainment. Although he is the novel’s moral compass, he makes money from turning crime into public media.

He cannot accept that the girl he loved, Joey, died in an accidental house fire. He blames himself. He is haunted for nearly 20 years after by his belief that he had not done enough to protect Joey. His view of her as a delicate beauty with vulnerable sensitivity and a fragile sense of self-worth presents a heteropatriarchal view of romantic relationships. Furthermore, Drew’s moral sensibility is challenged when he sees Joey in the strip club: “He understood what was happening. He just didn’t want to see” (212). He chastises her for cheapening herself. Hillier subtly draws attention to gendered power dynamics that obscure the fact that Drew was himself a patron generating demand at the strip club.

The fight in the car on New Year’s Eve haunts him. However, Drew is given a second chance. In reuniting with Joey, helping her to thwart her mother’s blackmail plot, and rescuing her from drowning, Drew emerges as the novel’s romantic hero, epitomizing the theme of the resiliency of love.