Just read: Darkness Visible

So what can be said about this dark intriguing but somewhat clumsily written book? Like in a bad horror movie which hints at the nightmare ahead by showing glimpses of thing to come, this book outlines four sets of characters that will intersect at a later point. I am going through the works of Golding trying to find the reason for the Nobel Prize as well as fame and glory that he supposedly deserved for his works. This work definitely is not the reason, but then what do I know :) I am just a reader.

see what a lit crit article says about the book:

Darkness Visible is undoubtedly William Golding's most puzzling and enigmatic work, a fact that has not been lost on many critics who have noted its inscrutability without attempting a detailed analysis of the text. In fact, given the critical attention that Golding's work usually receives, criticism about Darkness Visible is conspicuous by its absence.' Golding refuses to comment about the novel, a refusal which perhaps suggests the extremely personal nature of the work and which ultimately draws more attention to it: "The fact of the matter is . . . that for a number of reasons Darkness Visible is the one of my books I have refused to talk
about: and the more I am pressed, the more stubborn my refusal has become" (Crompton, View 11). He will talk about his other wprks and has commented that "I've never read a criticism of my work which is half complicated enough. It's far more complicated than it looks" (Haffenden 105). Such authorial statements only add to the mystery inherent in Golding's work, a mystery culminating in Darkness Visible.
Darkness Visible-with its title from Paradise Lost (I:63), its epigraph from The Aeneid (6:266), and its narrative, in part, from the apocalyptic books of the Bible-is a novel about judgment.
read more of the article here