The Dark Net by Benjamin Percy is a complex story in which the horror is the realisation that it could happen to all of us, and we’d be unable to stop it!
There’s a large cast of characters at the beginning, which I have to admit you could easily lose track of, and it’s not everyone’s preferred writing style, but you just know there’s a reason these people are mentioned straight up and that they are all going to meet somewhere along the storyline to make sense of it all. As I read this it was like I had a movie playing out in my mind. We see shots of a dodgy run server group in one scene. Next we meet Hannah with a high-tech prosthetic that restores her sight, but can’t understand why she can now see shadows surrounding certain people. Then there’s Lala a technophobic journalist, (Hannah’s auntie ), Mike the gun hoarder who sees things that can’t possibly be there, Derek a genius hacker and, to top it all, a virus spreading through the net that had a very old-school, Shaun Hutson, evil, demonic force feel to it. Who can stop this evil presence from getting out of control and fight back?
Dark, creepy, urban-techno horror with an old-school, supernatural feel that I particularly enjoyed. What would we all do if the devil got inside our homes, schools, offices through our computers? Who’d save us? Not our anti-virus protection, that’s for sure!
The dark net is an online shadowland for criminals to operate anonymously, but when a demonic force begins to hack the minds of its users there is nowhere left to hide.
Twelve-year-old HANNAH has been fitted with a high-tech prosthetic that restores her sight, but can’t understand why she can now see shadows surrounding certain people.
LELA, an emotionally shut-off, technophobic journalist stumbles onto a story nobody wants her to uncover. A story someone will kill to keep hidden.
A former evangelist, MIKE, suffers demons – figurative and literal – and keeps an arsenal of weapons stored in the basement of the homeless shelter he runs.
And DEREK is a hacker who believes himself a soldier, part of a cyber army dedicated to changing the world for the better.
With the virus spreading throughout the net and an ancient evil threatening to break lose on the real world, it falls to these strangers to stop the rising darkness.
THE DARK NET is a cracked-mirror version of the digital nightmare we already live in, a timely and wildly imaginative techno-thriller about the evil that lurks in real and virtual spaces, and the power of a united few to fight back.
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Praise for THE DARK NET
‘THE DARK NET is a megawatt defibrillator to the reader’s heart‘ – Dean Koontz
‘An impressive, propulsive narrative velocity at work here’ – Metro
‘THE DARK NET kicked my ass with its deft mash-up of both blackhat hacker culture and black magic. A fast, fantastic, throat-punch of a read’ – Chuck Wendig, New York Times bestselling author of Blackbirdsand Zer0es
Benjamin Percy is an award-winning, genre-bending novelist, comics writer and screenwriter.
His is the author of four novels — most recently The Dark Net (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) — as well as The Dead Lands (Grand Central/Hachette, 2015), Red Moon (Grand Central/Hachette, 2013) and The Wilding (Graywolf Press, 2010).
He has published two books of stories, Refresh, Refresh (Graywolf Press, 2007) and The Language of Elk (Grand Central/Hachette 2013; Carnegie Mellon, 2006), and his third — Suicide Woods (Graywolf Press) — will release in the fall of 2019.
He is also the author of a book of essays — Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction (Graywolf Press, 2016) — which is widely taught in creative writing classes.
He broke into comics in 2014 with a two-shot Batman story in Detective Comics, and since then has gone on to write celebrated runs on Green Arrow, Teen Titans, and James Bond. He currently writes Nightwing for DC Comics.
His podcast — Wolverine: The Long Night (produced by Marvel and Stitcher and starring Richard Armitage as Logan) — is currently streaming.
His fiction and nonfiction have been read on National Public Radio, performed at Symphony Space, and published by Esquire (where he was a contributing editor for a decade), GQ, Time, Men’s Journal, Outside, the Wall Street Journal, the Paris Review, Tin House, Glimmer Train, Ploughshares, McSweeney’s, and many other magazines and journals.
His honors include an NEA fellowship, the Whiting Writers’ Award, the Plimpton Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and inclusion in Best American Short Stories and Best American Comics.
Learn more about him at http://www.benjaminpercy.com
Contact : Sassy.Brit@gmail.com
You got me at old school supernatural! Thanks for steering me to this one!
Those books that have twisty, thriller issues and could happen to you, always creep me out. I would rather live my little naive life, I think. 😁😁 Nice review though Sassy.