Benjamin Percy Takes Us Inside The Dark Net in August
Debi Moore
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Author, screenwriter, and comics writer Benjamin Percy straddles the boundaries of literary and genre fiction; and in August his fourth novel, The Dark Net, arrives to bring us hell on earth.
Prior to The Dark Net, Percy penned The Dead Lands, Red Moon, and The Wilding as well as two books of short stories and a craft book, Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction. He writes the Green Arrow and Teen Titans series for DC Comics and James Bond for Dynamite Entertainment. He is also a member of the WGA screenwriters’ union and has sold scripts to both FOX and STARZ.
Set in present day Portland, The Dark Net calls to mind “Mr. Robot” or “Black Mirror” and 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.
In writing his new novel, Percy chose fiction as an avenue to highlight the all-too-real nightmare happening right now. Every tech expert Percy spoke to in his research for this book warned him about China and Russia. Google, Apple, Verizon, and a half-dozen hacker patrols all said a major attack was coming because the Chinese and Russians are ALREADY inside the walls of our government. What did they plan to do with the information they already had access to? Cyberwar is almost certainly imminent, and The Dark Net ties in to the anxieties of the present and the paranoia of surveillance, bio-hacking, privacy, etc.
Synopsis:
Hell on earth is only one click of a mouse away in acclaimed writer Benjamin Percy’s terrifying new horror novel. The Deep Web is a very real, anonymous, and often criminal arena that exists in the secret, far reaches of the Internet. Some use it to manage Bitcoins, pirate movies and music, or traffic in drugs, people, guns, and stolen goods. In THE DARK NET, being released by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on August 1st (pre-order here), the monsters of the Dark Net threaten the world–virtually, digitally, physically, and even spiritually–unless they can be stopped by members of a ragtag crew.
Twelve-year-old Hannah–who has been fitted with the Mirage, a high-tech visual prosthetic to combat her blindness–wonders why she sees shadows surrounding some people. Lela, her aunt, a technophobic, danger-prone journalist for The Oregonian, has stumbled upon a story nobody wants her to uncover. Mike Juniper, a one-time child evangelist who suffers from personal and literal demons, has an arsenal of weapons stored in the basement of the homeless shelter he runs. And Derek, a hacker with a cause, believes himself a soldier of the Internet, part of a cyber army akin to Anonymous. They have no idea what the Dark Net really contains, but together they fight demons real and imaginary in a good vs. evil story where it’s not always clear who’s on what side.
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