So...this one caught me by surprise.

It came on my radar, because Zuky the Book Bum loved it, and I respect her choices. I read the description and thought it sounded like it was worth a shot.

And then, I think I sat on it for the better part of a couple of years. God knows why. Just never got around to it. Other books looked sexier.

Zuky, in her excellent review, states that the summary description for the novel is off, and I have to agree. This really sounds like it's all tech, some more tech, with some tech layered on top. And it sort of is, but mostly isn't. There's a lot of tech, but there's also a whole lotta creepy goodness in the form of demons, and hellhounds, and red right hands, and an ancient woman with...well, powers, and a demon-battling former child preacher.

Honestly...there's a lot going on in this novel and, with the exception of the author bringing up Hanna right at the beginning, then kind of forgetting about her for the first half of the novel, he does a great job of keeping all the balls in the air.

But there's one other major selling point here, and that's Percy's narrative style. You know how there's some authors (maybe your John Grishams and your James Pattersons) who can put one word in front of the other, and get the story down, and it's readable, and maybe even drives you forward, but that's about it?

And you know how there's other authors—much more rare and not often seen out in the wild—who write with a flair, with a lovely turn of phrase, who won't just settle for the first word that comes along, but finds the precise right word or phrase that makes that sentence burst into your mind like fireworks?

Yeah, Benjamin Percy is that second kind of writer.

Definitely worth the read. Great writing, great characters, great story, great fun. ( )

Once again I think my mania to not read plot details in advance of reading a book may have betrayed me here. I saw this on a shelf in an independent bookstore on the Outer Banks and thought it was right up my alley as a techo cyberthriller with a touch of Stephen King. In my opinion it had very little actual technology or cyberthriller aspects and went too far into the action scenes that you find in a King novel without the incredibly deep background he provides. It is like one of those movies that is entirely car chase scenes and fight after fight after fight... The set up was actually decent, I found it a little disjointed but I then got our cast of characters straight and off we went. I never felt as if we were working on solving a mystery though, it all ended up being mayhem and craziness with way too many bad guys thrown in. There were some obvious payoffs, thus there was no payoff to them, and a couple of deus ex machina moments (in my opinion) during the "exciting" climax that boiled down to "she decided to just throw something somewhere and magically all the evil was gone." We had no inkling that this would happen but it happens. Yay I guess. Finally there is an epilogue that I kept thinking must have been from another book. It wasn't of course but it had some of our characters in a totally different place for a gratuitous victory. I really wanted to enjoy this book but in the end, as the two star rating is labeled, it was just ok. ( )

this is not what i thought it was and not what i really wanted. the story is interesting but the title and blurb are somewhat misleading. ( )

The Dark Net is an interesting and difficult-to-classify book. At first, it feels like a technology-themed contemporary, but after a few chapters, it becomes apparent that there are also paranormal things going on. In the end, I think I'd call it a paranormal techno-thriller; it felt like it was trying to be horror, but the execution left a little to be desired.

I think the characters were this book's biggest asset. It featured a fairly wide range of personalities, and there were points when the dialogue hummed with a witty energy that I loved (granted, this wasn't constant). Even the idea of the plot (demonic entities using technology to gain power over people in this new, technology-dependent era) worked pretty well for me. However, a lot of the book (especially in the second half) felt like the author wrote it to establish a certain aesthetic rather than because there was any real reason for it. For example, there is a point where one of the characters gets electrocuted and becomes an entity that exists only within technology . However, the book didn't offer a clear explanation for why the "death" occurred. Also, the depiction of existing within technology didn't seem to have anything to do with that technology; for the most part, it felt like the author just used those scenes as an excuse to bring classic horror elements (such as a haunted house, bats, skeletons, etc.) into the story. In general, I just wanted the book to follow a central line of logic, but most of the events, especially the paranormal stuff, didn't get a satisfactory explanation.

Toward the end, the timeline of the book also becomes a little bit confusing. One notable part that I remember is the aforementioned scene where the character goes into the world of technology. In this scene, the entire cast of main characters is present. In a following chapter, one of the main characters is out on his own, bombing a building, but in the following chapter, we're back in the previous scene and they haven't split up to do the bombing yet. Nothing was really gained from presenting these events out of order except confusion.

As far as the writing itself, this book was written in a somewhat confused mix of past and present tense. I will disclose here that I am somewhat biased in that I am typically annoyed when books are written in the present tense. I like and am used to the past tense, so when I notice present tense verbs, it throws me out of the story and I automatically assume it was a mistake for a minute until I remember that the whole thing has been written that way. Well, with The Dark Net, it's not all written that way. In certain places, the book goes back to narrate new scenes in previously-occurring events, and instead of narrating everything the same, these chapters are primarily past tense. The switching tenses only served to throw me further out of the story.

Aside from the tenses, the writing was not bad. Benjamin Percy made the stylistic choice to use frequent sentence fragments in his narrative, which I am not personally fond of (I'm a bit of a grammar nazi), but it's clear from his writing that he does know his way around the English language. None of the grammar errors in the book felt accidental, except for a few typos, which were to be expected since I was reading an ARC copy.

In general, I enjoyed this book and think Benjamin Percy has a lot of promise as a writer, but I need books that are a little less sloppily put together. ( )

"When you know someone's pissed about what you're writing - when you know you're potentially in danger - that's when you know you're doing your job." (quotation page 36)

Content:
Lela Falcon, reporter, is researching a story about a company called Undertown, that had now ownes a building connected to Lela's first story, many years ago, about the serial killer Tusk. Now his sign, a red right hand appears again. He is dead - is he? Together with her niece Hannah, Mike Juniper, Josh, intern at her editor and his friend Derek, a genious of a hacker, she tries to stop an ancient dark force that is about to change the world through an internet virus.

This thrilling story is a combination of magic, horror and modern technology. It is gripping and makes you hope for the lives of the protagonists that try everything to stop the dark forces.

A book that makes you unable to put down, but for readers like me too much of "traditional horror" with ugly figures to fight. I was hoping for more IT and dark net instead. But with the story developing and going on, it absolutely convinced me, drove me forward until the end. Definitely a book for readers that like the horror-genre and authors like Stephen King. ( )