Dark Angels: A Novel of the Future Past

by Steven Fraccaro

The setting is the near future. People across the city are dying. An unidentified virus, a political assassin, a serial killer—or something far worse.

A novel written on the edge. Not exactly science fiction, Dark Angels occupies a place between past and future—which isn’t exactly the present. Metaphysical and political by implication, the novel depicts a world that isn’t so much a dystopia as simply a slight variation on the world we live in.

What if the system that rules the world could read your mind, anticipate your every desire, your every thought? What if crime were allowed, as long as it was predictable? What if all this happened twenty years ago and you didn’t know it? And what if the system inexplicably started to lose control? Welcome to the world of Dark Angels.

155 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 30, 2013

Reviews

[Michael Gottlieb · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel surprises, and keeps surprising. It is not just a dystopian policier. It is science fiction and it is metaphysical allegory. It is close-eyed observation with social commentary worthy of any realist novel; and it keeps surprising. And that turning, that shifting of ground under the reader’s feet is one of its two most impressive formal features. Just as you get comfortable, just as you think you understand what kind of book this is, it turns and changes: this policier becomes a work of science fiction and then it becomes something else. And it does all that in an entirely persuasive, compelling, understated tone of voice.

Part of that tone resides in the main character’s cool professional demeanor, which, by serving up the book’s grotesque and awful unfoldings so matter-of-factly magnifies their impact immensely. But part of it is something else: it is the author’s quiet ability to put words together into sentences, sentences together into paragraphs, paragraphs into chapters and chapters into this book, in a similar restrained, supremely confident fashion. In no small part it is by virtue of that careful tone that the reader is carried, essentially without any volition on his or her part – because this book cannot be put down, and any resistance, as they say, would be futile – to a conclusion that, like so much of what came before, is as entirely unforeseen as it is magisterially devastating.

[Recalcitrant Press]

Dark Angels is indeed dark, also sexy, intriguing, even disturbing. This novel is almost impossible to put down – it draws you in from the moment you begin reading and unfolds with a deftly told story that takes place in an unnamed city that is somehow familiar but also one you hope doesn’t really exist or ever will. The main character, Robert Strange, is assigned the task of monitoring people’s thoughts, which he performs with a considerable amount of resentment towards his employer, a corporation that appears to have society under control – until people start dying in unexplained ways. A mysterious woman with red hair seems to hold the key to the series of deaths. Difficult to categorize – not a thriller, not science fiction – the writing style is internal, even visionary. If you want something different, this is definitely worth reading.

Amazon review by spetstellab, December 3, 2013


http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Angels-Ste...