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Overgenomen van "https://archiefwiki.org/index.php?title=Minuut&oldid=5312" david blogstars: Catherine Breillat - La belle endormie AKA The Sleeping Beauty (2010)
Diposting oleh bogeb di 06.00 The Dark Net by Benjamin Percy, Paperback | Barnes & Noble® B&N Top 100 NY Times Bestsellers
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.
Hannah wasn’t born blind, but sometimes it feels that way. She has retinitis pigmentosa, what she calls RP. Like, I’m so sick of this stupid RP. Which makes the disease sound like one of those jerks she goes to middle school withthe BGs and BJs and RJswho talk too loudly and wear chunky basketball shoes and toss French fries dipped in mustard across the cafeteria and draw dicks on people’s lockers with permanent marker.
Her mother could never afford the surgerythe removal of the post subcapsular cataracts and spoke-wheel pattern of cysts, the insertion of the casing and array and antennae along the periphery of her socketswhich didn’t matter: the tech company would pay for everything, so long as she agreed to serve as their lab rat and advertisement.
Hannah knows the sun is a yellow ball of fireshe can still see the smear of itbut the image has been replaced more by a feeling of warmth that tingles the hair on her arms and makes her turn her face toward the source. Yes, a pine tree has a reddish trunk and green needles and cuts away the sky when you stand beneath it, but for her the sensory analogue is the smell of resin and the feel of scabby bark plates beneath her palm and the sound of the hushing, prickling breeze when it rushes through the branches. The ability to see has become an abstraction, something she can only vaguely imagine, like time travel or teleportation.
She sits on an exam table with the doctor leaning in and her mother hovering nearby. He tries to make small talkasking how’s school, is she excited, will she do anything to celebratebut she can barely manage a response, all of her attention on the tug of his hands, the wounded ache of her eyes.
A part of Hannah feels lighter, more buoyant, now that she’s unrestricted by all that gauze and tape, but another part of her feels more panicked than everas if, when he said, “There,” a light switch should have turned on in her head. For now there is only darkness. Her brain churns. She can taste her breakfast in her throat.
There is a game she sometimes plays. The wishing game. She’ll say, “I’m looking forward to our trip to Costa Rica,” or “I’m riding a horse across the Scottish Highlands,” and then, as if a spell has been cast, an image will crystallize. She is on a white sand beach with coconuts thudding the sand and dolphins arcing from a lagoon. She is pounding across a bog, through swirling mists, while the horse kicks up divots of mud and bagpipes honk and wheeze. No matter how expensive or distant or impossible the dream, the wishing game makes anything possible.
“I can see,” she says. She has said this many times before, has whispered it into her pillow and coat collar and closet, testing the words in quiet places to see if they spoil once released to the air. But this time it’s true. She can see.
It is difficult for her to comprehend images, her frame of reference so far limited to her other senses. What she sees is like an echo. And inside the echo there is another voice. There is a blazing white above, and a muted white all around, through which thingspeople?move. Her mother asks, “Can you see me? Hannah?”
She sees something, but is it her mother? It must be. But everything is mixed up. She can’t forge colors with shapes or shapes with distance or distance with texture, every different input temporarily fizzling her brain, making her want to shout, “Does not compute, does not compute!” As if someone put a banana under her nose and a shark in front of her face and jazz in her ear and a broom in her hand and said, “What a beautiful sunset.”
"Percy (The Dead Lands) turns in a fast-paced thriller with crisp, honest dialogue and well-imagined characters. His premise is fanciful yet anchored in believability." — Library Journal
There's a deep global net in the virtual world, accessed only by those wishing to remain anonymous. Black-market trading and illicit dealings occur here, along with programs that provide prurient services. Keeping their operations vital but nearly untraceable is the task of people who are well paid to keep these servers up and running. What happens when demonic forces acquire log-in abilities at these dark levels? Can a computer hacker, a onetime child evangelist, a technophobic journalist, and a little girl with prosthetic eyes come to grips with hell on earth if it's only a keystroke away? VERDICT Percy (The Dead Lands) turns in a fast-paced dark thriller with crisp, honest dialog and well-imagined characters. His premise is fanciful yet anchored in believability. [See Prepub Alert, 2/27/17.]—Russell Miller, Prescott P.L., AZ
In Percy's (Thrill Me, 2016, etc.) techno-horror thriller, a small band of misfits must counteract a full-scale demon possession of Portland, Oregon.Below the internet we use every day lurks a violent and terrible place known as the Dark Net. This is where people come to satisfy their most destructive and perverted desires, and, according to Percy, it's naturally where demons would go when working to possess people in the 21st century. While the demons in question begin by possessing the bodies of humans in order to physically manipulate and control technology, their ultimate quest is nothing less than complete domination of the human race, to be achieved through torture and mass murder. And the only people who can stop it are a 12-year-old blind girl, two demon hunters "on the spectrum" (meaning they have supernatural tendencies of their own), and an intrepid reporter. Percy's vision rather obviously offers commentary on our contemporary lifestyle: "People fuss so much about what they eat.…But they don't worry as much about what they consume online." Once the demon virus is released from the Dark Net, anyone accessing our everyday staples—Netflix, Tinder, Google—becomes a homicidal maniac. Percy takes the darkest conspiracy theories you can imagine and makes them the stuff of nightmares. Oh, and all this happens on Halloween, "the fall climax…a time of reaping harvest, of accounting." Humankind is held responsible for its irresponsibility, paying the price for all the convenience we take for granted, for our obsession with the digital world. While the message is effective and scary, though, the characters and the writing fall short of mesmerizing. Who says science and religion are incompatible? There's something undeniably creepy about the thought that your smartphone can possess you. A gory cautionary tale.
The Dark Net 3.8 out of 5 based on 0 ratings. 9 reviews.
Criss between Sci Fi, horror, & mysticism. Not my cup of tea,but kept my interest.
First, I want to say that it has been awhile since I read this book and I’ve been remiss in reviewing, so it sort of goes without saying (though, I guess I’m saying) that my review is based more on my feelings about the book because the fine details have floated away into the ether. Therefore, no summary. Thank goodness for Goodreads, right? The most important point I would make is that I would read it again. Not like an annual reread. It isn’t a new favorite. But it was interesting enough – different enough – that I’d enjoy reading it again. While I couldn’t recount the ins and outs of the story, I can tell you that the premise is current technology meets ancient demons. Good vs. evil with evil finding more modern ways to creep into our lives and dominate. The characters were likeable, the pace was good. I always enjoy a supernatural element. I find the more fantastical something is, the easier it is to let go and sink into the story because I’m not fighting preconceived notions based on my own reality. Fantasy = unknown reality. And there is so much room for creativity when there aren’t as many rules. So, yay for that! There was a point towards the end where I felt it got a little out of hand. Or rather, it was a bit inconsistent. Kind of like going from a mainstream horror film to a B movie. It isn’t that I don’t appreciate B movies. I definitely do. It’s the transition from something supernatural but somewhat serious to something less so that bothered me. Not enough to make me put it down, and not enough to make me change my recommendation, but it’s worth noting. Mostly because it’s something that I recall six weeks after finishing it. In a nutshell, it was entertaining, had story elements that I tend to appreciate, and was a fun enough read that I’d do it again. Considering it’s been six weeks since I finished it, I’d say that’s a decent enough recommendation. Note: I received this book from the publisher. I pride myself on writing fair and honest reviews.
The Dark Net, in theory, sounded like a great techno-thriller. Demons on the web, working their way into people’s lives through technology and ‘virtually’ unstoppable. Unfortunately the dark net hardly had any part in the story. The demons were using the dark net for their plan, but other than a few brief mentions and not very much detail at all the books namesake was tossed out the window. So much for supernatural techno-thriller based on the dark net. The first 60% of the book is spent on setting the story up. You meet a character, follow them and learn their backstory; then hop on over to another character, follow them and learn their backstory. Honestly it’s really tedious, and this is from the girl who loves characterization over anything in her books. But during that time the book is so very slow and hardly any of the plot moves forward. Then there’s our antagonist. There isn’t really a main antagonist. A couple of baddies with names pop up, and maybe toward the very end we finally see someone who could be called the ‘leader’, but none of it is ever mentioned. The story just seems like it’s in bits and pieces; as if the author pulled ideas from this story and that story and tried to make them fit together and it didn’t quite work out right. The book itself didn’t know what it was supposed to be and the characters forgot their lines and were on the wrong set and missed their cues. A downright jumbled mess.
A brainchild between Clive Barker, Greg Bear, and Edward Lee, The Dark Net scared the hell out of me. Percy keeps at it, reinforcing this paranoid fear by doing what great horror writers of his caliber are known for: they make you believe the stories they write. If only for a moment, and that moment is more than enough. With fantastic execution, Percy slithers fragments of this horror into the reader’s subconscious, making them experience things on an imaginative level. Something you couldn’t explain. Dismiss. Ignore. However, it would be illogical of me to keep comparing certain aspects or elements of The Dark Net to other existing work, because put simply: it is nothing like your average run of the mill sci-fi horror book. Read that again. Sci-fi horror. I don’t scour the web every two minutes or delve into the vast multitude of sub-genres (horror steampunk being a new trend you’ll be seeing soon) but I’m quite certain not many mainstream novels have quite wholly embraced horror and science fiction as a combined ingredient. Naturally you’ll find a few if you look carefully enough, then again not many would risk it for the sake of juggling two very different and yet eerily similar genres (here’s looking at you, Dead Space) in the hopes of producing something that would be an instant hit. The Dark Net, from a technical perspective in regards to character development, plot, and motive, is perfect.
First thought when I finished early, early this morning - WOW! I had such a hard time deciding on reading this book. I loved Benjamin Percy's book "Red Moon" and was so excited to see this one offered by him. However, I was concerned with there being a lot of "geek speak". Well, there was some, but not a lot. I do remember one time when my eyes were crossing but that feeling did not last long. There was a lot of "freak speak" which I was used to in the author's other book. This suspenseful, action packed thriller had me mesmerized. I stayed up way too late to finish it. I kept putting it down to sleep. Then, I would pull it back out and read some more. I could not leave it even though my body was telling me "it will be there in the morning". A great read which I truly enjoyed! Thanks to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Net Galley for providing me with a free e-galley in exchange for an honest, unbiased review.
Ben Percy remains one of our most exciting writers; whether he is tackling essays on craft or novels about demons, the man continues to electrify. The Dark Net can be read as a metaphor for modern lives becoming more and more dependent on technology, or as a freakishly creepy and edge-of-your-seat thriller. Either way, you won't be able to put it down.
The Dark Net is the darkest corner of the internet where the evils in this world lurk. People think because they can dip their toe into it in the privacy of their house means they are safe. But they are not. Pure evil lives there and it can come to those that explore that corner of the internet. But with any dark there is light. Those that can see the evil and can fight it. This is one of those books that you can’t really classify and don’t go by the blurb, that doesn’t even begin to describe it. Hannah slowly became blind but with the Mirage device she can now see but she is seeing dark shadows around people. Her aunt is a newspaper reporter writing about serial killer Jeremy Tusk. But it’s not just him that is important, the Rue apartments also has a past. Mike Juniper that has his own past that has him stockpiling weapons for fighting demons. The techno part is that demons have been plaguing man for millennia and just as time has changed and things that draw and fascinate people changes so do the demons. It’s going to be up to those that walk the light to fight the rising dark. I really enjoyed this story, it was a great mashing of genera’s. But I admit that it didn’t flow well and had a rough ending. Having said that it was worth the read. I will definitely be checking out other books by Benjamin Percy. I received The Dark Net from the publisher for free. This has in no way influenced my opinion of this book.
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