Ben Percy reads from "The Dark Net." He will be joined by Marlon James for a conversation about writing outside the literary fiction mainstream.

Hell on earth is only one click of a mouse away in acclaimed writer Benjamin Percy’s terrifying new novel. 

The Dark Net is real. An anonymous and often criminal arena that exists in the secret, far reaches of the Web, some use it to manage Bitcoins, pirate movies and music, or traffic in drugs and stolen goods. And now, an ancient darkness is gathering there as well. These demons are threatening to spread virally into the real world unless they can be stopped by members of a ragtag crew: 

• 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. 
• A technophobic journalist named Lela has stumbled upon a story nobody wants her to uncover.  
• Mike Juniper--a one-time child evangelist who suffers from personal and literal demons--has an arsenal of weapons stored in the basement of the homeless shelter he runs.  
• And Derek, a hacker with a cause, believes himself a soldier of the Internet, part of a cyber army akin to Anonymous. 

They have no idea what the Dark Net really contains.

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Benjamin Percy has won a Whiting Writers' Award, a Plimpton Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the author of the novels The Dead Lands, Red Moon, and The Wilding, and two short story collections, Refresh, Refresh and The Language of Elk, and Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction. He lives in Minnesota with his family.  

Marlon James is the author of the Man Booker Prize-winning novel A Brief History of Seven Killings. His previous books include The Book of Night Women and John Crow’s Devil. His next novels will be a trilogy of Lord of the Rings-inspired novels, infused with African mythology. He recently told Entertainment Weekly, “I want monsters and magical beings! Just in the first 50 pages of this book, this guy’s already gone underwater to the Underworld. He’s running into these mer-creatures who cause huge sickness.”