Dark Souls: Healing and Recovering from Toxic Relationships

Sarah Strudwick
SS Products (2010)
ISBN 9780956645807
Reviewed by Vickie Landes for Reader Views (12/10)

 

“Dark Souls” is an in-depth look at one woman’s difficult journey in overcoming a particularly toxic relationship with a man whom she believes may be narcissistic.  In telling her story, she delves into the research she’s done on sociopaths, narcissism, and other psychopathic personalities in hopes that her pain and lessons learned will assist other women.  Heartfelt from start to finish, author Sarah Strudwick seems to genuinely strive to give any and all information she has to keep others from having to endure the same traumatic experiences.  That being said, the book was not without its problems.

While I appreciate Strudwick’s goals in wanting to inform her audience of what these personality types are capable of, I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of ‘revenge’ or ‘getting back’ at her ex-lover by going public with this private – and embarrassing – information.  There were several instances where she kept bringing up one of his ‘hobbies’ over and over (one that I actually had to go look up because I had no idea what it meant), even bringing its mention into unrelated information just to make sure we know he does this.  She also notes that she ‘refuses to diagnose him’ yet spends the entire book giving every indication otherwise.  Granted, “Dark Souls” is not only a self-help book, but a memoir so I guess a little ‘airing of dirty laundry’ is to be expected. 

The book’s editing is unfortunately something which requires mention.  Even when overlooking the ‘Queens English’ spelling and formatting differences, “Dark Souls” is an editing nightmare.  Misspellings, punctuation and grammatical mistakes, run on sentences, inappropriate and repeated words, incomplete sentences and sentence fragments, and so much more run rampant on almost every page.  As an example, she begins a story about her friend ‘Linda’ and then calls her ‘Sandra’ later in the same paragraph.  In the next paragraph, she switches back to ‘Linda.’  I reread these paragraphs to see if I may have missed a second person (i.e., Sandra) as opposed to this being an editing mistake.  Even after rereading several times, the story remains clear it’s about only one person.  The constant barrage of mistakes was a significant irritation throughout and it really took away from the author’s credibility as an expert on the subject. 

“Dark Souls” is the compilation of researched information on psychopathic personalities (particularly sociopath and narcissistic) combined with details of one woman’s romantic affair with an undiagnosed, married man.  I applaud author Sarah Strudwick’s strength in separating herself and healing from this abusive relationship but I found the book to be disorganized, full of repeated information, and badly edited.  Strudwick does write with a genuine and brave spirit and I’m sure many of the details included within the pages were difficult to put on paper, much less publish for the world to read.  A more organized approach and several more proofreads would have better served her story.

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