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.
About the Author
Benjamin Percy is the award-winning author of the novel, The Wilding (forthcoming from Graywolf, September 28, 2010), as well as two books of short stories, Refresh, Refresh (Graywolf, 2007) and The Language of Elk (Carnegie Mellon, 2006).
Publishers Weekly gave The Wilding a starred review, saying "Percy's excellent debut novel...digs into the ambiguous American attitude toward nature as it oscillates between Thoreau's romantic appreciation and sheer gothic horror... It's as close as you can get to a contemporary Deliverance."
Percy's honors include a Whiting Writers Award, the Plimpton Prize, the Pushcart Prize, and inclusion in Best American Short Stories. His fiction and nonfiction appear in Esquire (where he is a regular contributor), Outside, Men's Journal, the Paris Review, Orion, Tin House, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, and many other magazines and journals. He teaches in the MFA program at Iowa State.
Industry Reviews
Written in vivid, often lyrical prose, but with exhilarating comic-book energy, THE DARK NET is a megawatt defibrillator to the reader's heart. Quirky but very human characters confront an explosive emergence of the supernatural into our world, in this imaginative, spooky, swiftly paced tale threaded through with dark humor. -- Dean Koontz
THE DARK NET kicked my ass with its deft mash-up of both blackhat hacker culture and black magic. Percy reveals an upgraded, rebooted battle between good versus evil - a fast, fantastic, throat-punch of a read. -- Chuck Wendig, NYT bestselling author of Blackbirds and Zer0es
Benjamin Percy's THE DARK NET channels the spirit of your favorite sprawling and epic, 1980's horror/thriller novels into a tightly paced, nasty, unrelenting 21st century nightmare. An addictive and frightening read. -- Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and Disappearance at Devil's Rock
This is one hell of a body of work. Red Moon is about the rise of extremist, The Dead Lands about the decline of the American Dream, The Dark Net about privacy, surveillance and our technocratic state. They have nothing to do with one another, except that they're all dark mirrors to the now: genre fiction used in its hardest-hitting and most daring way. * Pornokitsch *
Simply a cracking read. It is fast paced, and left me reeling in places. I highly recommend The Dark Net. * Brew & Books Review *
An impressive, propulsive narrative velocity at work here * Metro *
Verdict: A truly dark urban horror tale * Sci-Fi Bulletin *
Simply a cracking read. It is fast paced, and left me reeling in places. I highly recommend The Dark Net * Brew & Books Review *
Percy's narrative is as lean as a jaguar, and it sprints ahead with a clean, swift motion . . . Restrained yet lyrical, his prose raises his characters off the page, while making Portland more than a generic urban setting. * Locus *
A lean, scary, Stephen King-infused chiller with great characters, mythology, villains and, impressively, a genre story about the dangers of technology addiction that doesn't feel like it's a dated piece of panic. * SciFiNow *
The fate of the world in Percy's novel depends on the ability of a motley gang of misfits to head off the satanic forces emanating from the murkiest recesses of the internet. It's one of the best Stephen King novels not written by the master himself. * New York Times *
A highly entertaining read * BookRiot.com *
