Dark

The Dark Trilogy, Book 1

De: Paul L. Arvidson

Narrado por: Benjamin Fife

In the strange labyrinth of pipes on the planet called Dark, things are falling apart. Dun doesn't want to be a hero, he just wants to find an answer to the terrifying dreams he's been having. But the answers, the real answers, are going to take him places he's never imagined and tear him from the only home he's ever known.

With a half-finished map from his missing father, an old friend, a new friend, and the mysterious Myrch to guide him, he journeys through parts of his world he's never imagined. Are his dreams real foretellings? Who can he trust to be who they say there are? What are the strange forces that seem to be literally pulling their world apart?

As he travels through a world that is much bigger than he thought it was, what he won't know will kill him. And everyone he knows.

©2016 Paul L. Arvidson (P)2020 Paul L. Arvidson

A Good Start to a Compelling Trilogy

Dark is an interesting high fantasy/steampunk hybrid of a story unlike any other I've read before. I hear it's the start of a trilogy, and I'm intrigued to read the rest. This book is set on a planet called Dark which has layers of livable levels, but not all levels are equal. Our protagonist Dun and his rag-tag team who set out on a quest to discover what has happened to the "machine makers" come from a place far beneath the surface in a village of people that are much more wolflike and primitive than people closer to the planet's surface. Wealth and knowledge have both been lost this far down.

I'm a sucker for steampunk, and I love stories that analyze how different cultures would think of advanced technology. It's an interesting concept to put the vastly different cultures, the primitives and the technologically advanced, on the same planet, and in a planet that has apparently been extensively altered by the advanced species no less. I like the concept of a planet that has been turned partly into a machine, and once I understood that that's what has happened on this planet, some of the vocabulary our main characters use made a little more sense. Time is measured in clicks, spans, and cycles. Spans is a pretty pedestrian alternate term for days, and cycles can be planetarily linked but clicks stood out as new to me. I had no idea why they would use such a word until I realized the planet itself probably clicks or ticks rhythmically.

Similarly, I didn't realize that our main characters actually weren't bare-skinned humanoids right away and actually found the wolf-like vocabulary annoying. It felt like an old, tired way to demonstrate how primitive these people are. Perhaps I missed some description near the beginning that would have dispelled that sooner. It's not until very close to the end when the main characters make a big deal out of the fact that one character doesn't have fur that I realized they do have fur. This then lead me to wonder if the death prayer-thing one of them utters at one point about "to the egg again" means these fur-covered people literally lay eggs? Again, either I missed the details that confirmed that earlier on, or the details weren't there. If I missed it, it was because the beginning was so heavy in world-building that felt like the set up for 6th century Wales peasant village rather than the steampunk adventure I was promised, and I was bored. Most first book high fantasies suffer this sort of pitfall, though, so I don't consider it too much of a flaw. Either world-building gets in the plot's way, or the plot gets in the way of world-building, the reader it left with questions. In this case, most questions were answered in time, so that's a plus.

Once the main cast hits the road and starts encountering other peoples from other villages as they get closer and closer to the surface, the story gets a lot more interesting and compelling. Once they finally reach the land of the "machine folk," I had to finish the rest of the book in a single session. We finally got to the techy steampunk bit, and I want more!

This is a review for the audiobook specifically, so let's talk about the narration. Overall, excellent performance from the narrator. He was clear and easy to understand (even at the times when I felt the need to play it at 2x speed) and he did a good job of making different characters sound distinct when speaking. I loved the dedication to incorporating sound effects and the completely different vocalizations and language of the creatures the main cast finds just outside the land of the machine folk. My only complaints are that there was a point where the clicking of something moving up above the characters as they were speaking at some point was a little too loud in comparison to the actual narration, and one character was given an accent that was quite jarring. I believe it was Merch, and the purpose was to make it clear that he's very different from everyone else, but somehow in this machine planet world this person blending in with fur-covered and possibly egg-laying primitive people kind of sounded Scottish sometimes but also vaguely slavic. This wasn't a character that seemed to have actually come from a group of people who might have once been Earthlings, so the distinct accent that could be clocked as familiar pulled me out of the story at bit at times.

Overall the narration was very good, and if I could award half-stars on Audible and Goodreads I would call it a 4.5, but I can't so a 4 it must be. It wasn't a 5, but it was very good.

As for the story itself and an overall rating for this title, I'm also going to say 4 out of 5 stars. Again if half-stars were possible on all the platforms I'll be posting my review I would give halves, and the story element would get 3.5, but I can't, so again 4 it is. Either way, that all averages out to 4 out of 5 overall.

I listened to this title in order to provide my honest review in conjunction with a blog tour for Dark with Audiobookworm Promotions, and I would like to thank the author Paul L. Arvidson for the complementary Audible code. My thoughts are my own and my review is honest.

Odd type of Story

This story is about a world where the people are mammals of some sort ( possible Moles) who we are lead to guess developed after humans left a area or planet ( not really sure). I found this story odd and a lot of pieces missing to truely understand where this place is. This is a unusual concept and will need to read/ listen to next book to get answers to the missing pieces.

Great story

Great story and characters. Highly entertaining to listen to. Excellent narration as well. Highly recommend it.

Great

I absolutely loved this book. And Benjamin being the narrator was fabulous as always.

Great worldbuilding with several twists and turns

Dark is a promising start to a unique trilogy. Arvidson sets up a world with various cultures and shows their influence on each other, all while sticking to one basic premise - the nonhumanoids he focuses on are without sight. It's interesting how that develops into a people who discuss things in terms of smell, feel, sound, and "air-sense" which is basically them sensing how things around them displace air.

The last fifth of the novel really takes a turn, breaking off into engaging developments that deconstruct a lot of the prior novel. There's a couple of great twists I didn't see coming, but like a great twist, makes perfect sense with hindsight. Can't really explain better without spoiling things, but I'm really excited to see how the next novel progresses.

Fife's narration is top-notch. I've listened to his books before, but he really brought his A-game to the novel's wide cast of characters. The chattering folk were especially creepy, thanks to him.

I received a free copy of this audio book in exchange for an honest review.