By Benjamin Percy

Hodder, out August 3

Portland, Oregon – the unlikely setting for a very different attack on our reality by dark forces.

Many years ago, Quatermass creator Nigel Kneale came up with an idea for a Halloween film that combined modern day computer technology with forces older than humankind – but the movie that eventually came out didn’t use those core ideas very well (and Kneale understandably took his name off the script). While there have indeed been stories that mix the occult with computers and the internet in the intervening years, this is the first time that I’ve read one that really put a shiver up my spine.

Percy draws you into the characters at the heart of his tale before all hell lets loose. Like the city in which the story is set, all of them are damaged in ways, some of which are obvious, others that only become clear as the story unfolds. Twelve year old Hannah’s blindness is apparently cured by a new piece of technology (think Geordi’s VISOR from Star Trek, a comparison made in the book)  – but somehow that links her into the sides of the Dark Net that would be scary enough without involvement of any demonic forces. Her aunt Lela is an obsessed journalist who’s following up a major and gruesome story tied to a serial killer from the past; on the way, she comes in contact with Juniper, who’s now running a refuge centre in Portland, but whose own past has seen him deal with things outside normality.

The true scale of the threat gradually becomes clear to protagonists and reader, and Percy tips the story into full blown horror for the third act, as Hannah descends into a digital version of the circles of Hell. There things lurk and want to escape into our world… which, thanks to our modern obsession with smartphones and computers at every juncture of our lives, they believe they will be able to do.

The book makes a quite extraordinary right turn at the end – the final chapter reads as if it’s the start of something quite different featuring some of the same characters – but that doesn’t diminish the power of the confrontations on multiple levels that Percy sets up and resolves. There’s a cautionary tale at its core – and some telling observations on current society – but this is a very well told horrific tale.

Verdict: A truly dark urban horror tale. 9/10

Paul Simpson