Guest Post: Benjamin Percy Faces His Digital Demons for The Dark Net
Tomorrow, Benjamin Percy’s fourth novel, The Dark Net, arrives to bring us hell on earth.
Set in present day Portland, 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. With an all-too-real cyberwar almost certainly imminent, The Dark Net ties in to the anxieties of the present and the paranoia of surveillance, bio-hacking, and our loss of privacy.
Author, screenwriter, and comics writer Percy is on a blog tour in support of The Dark Net‘s August 1st release; and for his stop by Dread Central, we asked what inspired him to bring horror to the techno-based story…
Make it new.
That was the commandment of Ezra Pound. No matter if you’re working in poetry or prose, comics or screenwriting, every writer considers this when hammering the keyboard. How do you make the writing fresh and impactful? How do you acknowledge your influences without being slavishly and boringly beholden to them?
Consider how so many Westerns begin with a stranger riding into town. And then take a look at Last Man Standing, a film that opens with a shot of a Model T grumbling by a dead horse. A stranger rides into town, but this isn’t the Old West—it’s the 1920s, during Prohibition, and this is a story that from the very start feels both familiar and dissonant, as it blenders Western tropes into a gangster flick.
I was thinking about this when writing my latest novel, The Dark Net. My life has just enough church in it that demons feel more real than any other supernatural threats that go bump in the night. Randall Flagg—who haunts the pages of The Stand and other Stephen King stories—is evil incarnate and one of my favorite villains. I saw The Exorcist when I was thirteen, and I’ve never really recovered from Regan’s grinning gray-green face. The oxishly horned devil in Legend mesmerized me. So did the horrors of Rosemary’s Baby, Evil Dead, The Devil’s Advocate, and Hellraiser. And every time I bake, I think of Paranormal Activity, when the character dusts the floor with flour, capturing the hoof prints the demon tracks through.
In other words, I’ve been afraid of demons my whole life… and afraid to write about them. Because I didn’t want to simply rehash what others had already done.
Then my wife’s desktop started to chug slowly, clogged up with malware. Then my sister’s email started blasting off phishing scams. Then my father’s laptop froze when he clicked on the wrong attachment and a message came up, alerting him that his hard drive was being held hostage. We spend so much of our lives online—our phones and tablets and computers like prosthetic cerebrums, the glow of their screens reflected in our eyes—and all around me, people were getting hijacked, pirated… possessed.
It was then that the storyline began to lock malevolently into place, as I recognized our digital devices as the windows to our souls and bio-hacking as a 21st century version of demonic possession. And so I got to work. And made it new.
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.
Categorized:News
