Regular marked price: $14.95Discount Price: $13.45
Cost Savings: $1.50 (10%)Price fluctuation possible.
How soon does it ship: Normal ship time within one day
Shipping? Absolutely FREE if you qualify for Super Saver Shipping.
Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.52
EAN num: 9780312869922
ISBN number: 0312869924
Label: Orb Books
Manufacturer: Orb Books
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 288
Printing Date: December 14, 1999
Publishing house: Orb Books
Sale Popularity Level: 673668
Studio: Orb Books
Other books you might be interested in perusing:
Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
Who is the child of the night? That's what small-town reported Will Barbee must find out. Inexorably drawn into investigating a rash of grisly deaths, he soon finds himself embroiled in something far beyond mortal understanding.
Doggedly pursuing his investigations, he meets the mysterious and seductive April Bell and starts having disturbing, tantalizing dreams in which he does terrible things--things that are stranger and wilder than his worst nightmares. then his friends being dying one by one and he slowly realizes that an unspeakable evil has been unleashed.
As Barbee's world crumbles around him in a dizzying blizzard of madness, the intoxicating, dangerous April pushes Barbee ever closer to the answer to the question 'Who is the Child of Night?'
When Barbee finds out, he'll wish he'd never been born.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers -
A reporter named Barbee uncovers a murder, and a plot that goes deeper and deeper after meeting a bewitching woman named April.
He soon discovers that the pair of them are shapeshifters, with the ability to alter probability by the use of floating mental webs. These sorts of people are a result of speciation in the icy mountain region of the Gobi.
Eventually, they ruled the globe, until man domesticated the dog as an ally and knew enough to know that silver disrupts these mental webs. They are the source for most of the legends about monsters, gods and supernatural beings like werewolves and vampires.
Now, there are no full bloods left, and hundreds of recessive genes must express themselves to get
such a being. He will be known as the Child of Night.
A group of his friends know about this, which is why they removed him from their presence, but they are dying, one by one.
Rated by buyers 
-
I've developed a love-hate relationship with this classic tale of shapeshifting and witchcraft.
I loved Williamson's descriptive prose and found his ability to set up a mood truly brilliant. The concept of what the lycanthropes really are is extremely innovative and, as one reviewer mentioned, has been the basis for countless stories that came after. Williamson spins a fascinating story that interweaves the supernatural with science and does a compelling job considering when the book was written.
Unfortunately, the weakest part of the book is the hero. No seriously...he's a wimp. William Barbee is the most sad-sack, ineffectual character I've ever come across in Sci-Fi/Fantasy literature. He's perpetually petrified by his surroundings, pushed around by his companions and never EVER has the sense to ask the right questions. Granted, he's supposed to be somewhat of a loser. But Williamson drives the point home so hard, it's hard to root for him. Even towards the end, as Barbee plunges his way towards the Big Reveal and experiences some revalations of his own, he's still annoying.
It's like watching a great movie with a really bad leading man. If you can get past that, you'll enjoy this book.
Rated by buyers -
A not-so-successful journalist meets a dazzlingly fasvcinating young colleague at the airport: a scientific anthropological exoedition returns with a disquieting breaktrough about ancient human history. "Disquieting" would prove quite an euphemism, as events unfolds and the horrible truth becomes clear. Owing something to the Lovecraftians "The Outsider" and "The shadow over Innsmouth", this novel has a quite modern approach to horror, albeit having being written in 1948. Very interesting!
Rated by buyers -
The most pleasant surprise about "Darker Than You Think" for me is how NOT-dated it was. When I realized that it was a reprinting of a novel from the 1940's, I kind of expected the writing style to reflect its age. Not that 60 years is a LONG time in the writing world, but I have read other novels that practically screamed "Hey! I was written in the 1970's!" and so on. There was some jargon and lingo that was dated, and the newspaper was clearly NOT run in the computerized world. But other than that, this novel could ALMOST have been written this year.
My favorite element was probably the loose interpretation of lycanthropy. I wasn't as crazy about the use of the law of probability and such, but it was cool seeing one individual being able to turn into a wolf AND a saber tooth tiger AND a snake and so on. The explanation behind this was new and interesting, not quite like any other horror novel I have ever read.
The one thing about the writing style that DID bug me was the constant "shivering" by the main character. That and his flip flopping attitude about humanity versus the monster. For the very first part, once the real "horror" of the plot started to unfold, the guy was CONSTANTLY "shivering" in horror or "shuddering" in fear, and let's not forget "gasping" words such as "Huh." By the end of the book, I think one of those words was used at least once per page. As for the flip flopping, he would embrace the monsters, then he would rebel on behalf of his human friends, then he would embrace the monsters again, then he would rebel. And on and on. It got a little tiring.
BUT ... looking past those two elements, I enjoyed the novel quite a lot. It is definitely a worthy read.
Rated by buyers -
I've avoided writing a review of Darker Than You Think for an awfully long while. My reason is that I find it difficult to separate the novel from the time I very first read it and the kind, helpful man who wrote it. I read this book during the early 1950s because I admired and respected Jack Williamson as a man and a bit of a mentor for a youngster aspiring to be a writer.
During the intervening years I've read the book several times. Sometimes I've found 'mistakes' in his science distracting. Other times I've been slightly put off by implications of the plot I missed as a youngster.
I believe this book can be read and enjoyed strictly as a novel, as a demonstration of early years of SF, as a fun read to pique the not-too-skeptical imagination. As an indicator of Williamson's philosophy, of the power of 'dark forces' of the universe, a reader would be looking too far, too deep. Such thinking would be an anachronism, would have made Jack's life unbearable in the small, evangelical Christian town where we lived.
Read this book for fun and enjoy it.
Find other books like this one:
