I had such hopes for The Phone Company"The Phone Company" when I started reading it. The writing had a gritty immediacy that was unpleasant but compelling.

The story was centred around things that interest me: the online disinhibition effect and the dark side of social media which enables and even encourages us to be our worst selves.The mass voluntary sacrifice of privacy in order to be always on and always connected or just to get a better deal or a better ap.

With me, David Knight should have been preaching to the choir. I use a Samsung Smart Phone because I can easily take the battery out and kill the thing. I use duckduckgo as my default search engine and I have ghostery on both my browsers. Instead, he almost made me a fan of The Phone Company.

In the beginning I was pulled in by David Knight's world building. I liked that the Smart Phone was called a Tether (that's pretty much how I experience mine). I liked the evocation of life in a small town in Montana. I enjoyed the hinted at conspiracies and the smooth movement of the narrative backwards and forwards along the time line.

Sadly, after a while, it seemed that the book just lost its way.

The big bad Phone Company was TOO bad. It became pointlessly evil and ridiculously powerful, able to ignore the laws of physics. This changed it from a scary adversary into a force of nature with no personality and no agenda, just a huge potential for destruction.

The good guy, a local school teacher, widower, single parent and ludite was so boring and so weak, and so self-pitying that I wanted to help the Phone Company cut out his ineffectual but self-congratulatory liberal bleeding heart.

The good guy's best friend, a local Sheriff, started off interesting and then just faded to a plot device.

When we went on a pointless trip to Mount Rushmore just so I could be lectured on how terrible it was that this sacred place had been vandalised, I nearly added "The Phone Company" to my DNF pile.

I stuck with it because the writing was good and I foolishly believed that the story had to go somewhere eventually.

By the end of the book, the gritty edge had given way to nasty, but surprisingly coy, voyeurism mixed with a maudlin sentimental view of how much our hero loves his family.

I don't think I'll be reaching for any other David Jacob Knight books in the near future. ( )

I loved this book! Very well written with excellent pacing. Steve and Bill we’re both realistic protagonists. Highly recommend! ( )

I *love* my smartphone. It is my brain and I wear it in a holster on my hip wherever I go. This book made me afraid to use it for a week. The book is that good. ( )

Frankly, I think this story is about everyone’s worst nightmares. We all have phones. We all depend on them for everything under the sun. In this book, the author takes this to an extreme. In fact, after reading this book, I will never look at my cell phone the same way again. A phone company moves into Cracked Rock, Montana, helping things in the town begin to look up. There is new infrastructure, new opportunity, new ideas, and the best part is free phones for everyone. The new phone, the Tether, is the world’s smartest smart phone. It can do just about everything from spying on your neighbors to tracking your kids. Is this good or what? The story delves into a world that may well come to be some day in the future as phones become more and more an integral part of our lives, a part no one can live without. However, is this really all that good? The book provides an answer through a fantastic plot, centered around this new phone company, the phone and the citizen’s lives of Cracked Rock, Montana. The end results are perhaps not what you might expect, but they can happen and ring pretty true.

This is a fairly well written book, bringing to mind the eerie novels of Stephen King or Lovecraft. It’s a horror story with a distinct modern twist, one we all can envision happening and can all understand and appreciate. There’s creativity in the concept behind the book as well as in the follow through and in some of the apps the author includes. The story is riveting and almost too true to life. I am not one of the people who is currently tethered to my cell phone, but, then, I existed for many years in a world/era where there were no cell phones and everyone had to depend on plain, old landlines, without the many phone features and apps found today. Things were certainly different then. This book definitely brings this point home. This is a good book for anyone who enjoys a realistic, futuristic horror story, though it is a bit disjointed and can drag at times (I wanted things to move along quickly so I could see what the end result was NOW!). It may seem far-fetched to some, but it is not beyond the impossible, not what you look around to see how things are today. I do not normally read books that are in this genre (I am trying to move beyond my “box”, which is one reason why I chose this one), but this one definitely held my interest and attention. I received this from Library Thing to read and review. ( )

What if your phone could let you talk to the dead, fly a plane or drive car, what if it could help you do whatever mean or nasty thing you ever wanted to do. What if there was no privacy anymore, no secrets, no boundaries of right and wrong, what would you do to stop it to try to save the one you love. This is the gift of the phone company a horrible gift that will bring about the summoning of an ancient Lovecraft like horror called the provider. ( )