Dark

The Dark Trilogy, Book 1

By: Paul L. Arvidson

Narrated by: 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

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.

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.

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.

An Amazing World

Fascinating world, well-built, in which there is No Light! The inhabitants rely on over-developed other senses, including whiskers, to sense as well as a sighted person would in light. There's a war coming and our intrepid crew of would-be heroes make the long journey through every imaginable hazard to get topside. Finally, they find some friendlies which are now their allies in the war to come. It reads a little YA, but very well done.

Excellent story. Grabs quick and keeps unfolding

Excellent story that keeps unfolding to the end. Well written. You quickly care for the characters. Author has excellent imagination.

How well do you think you could live in complete darkness? What if everything went bump in the night?

Great Tale

This was an interesting tale; I fell into it and did not want to go to sleep. It took me a few minuets to realized that they were not human but I finally got it. They jump from the fire into the frying pan more than once through out the story and it keeps you interested. I enjoyed how the group worked together to solve their various problems and avoid death. In the end one of the group dies and it affects them all. They go separate ways at a certain point but I am sure they will meet again in the next book. The narrator did an awesome job with the entire performance. If you like different kinds of books you will find this a good read because it does not fall into the same old mold.


I received a free copy of this audio book from Story Origin for an honest review.

Unique world building

Great listen! It was engaging and interesting. A unique world. Can't wait for the sequel.

Gentle Ramble of an Adventure

Dark is a fun mix of fantasy and science fiction. The story starts us off on a quest with a crew of quaint, mannerly people who have shamans and a little spiritual or ritualist magic. The quest leads them further and further afield and each new encounter shifts the world a bit. More and more tech enters the scene and by the end, we a solid science fiction tale happening.

Dun is our main character and he’s just coming of age, an apprentice shaman to his people (the Bridge Folk). Their rivers are drying up & that means no fish which will mean eventual starvation. Someone must find the reason for this and fix it, if possible. This quest falls on his shoulders and he’s happy to take it on as it gives him the chance to find out what happened to his father, who left many years ago on his own quest. Along the way, they (Dun. Padj, and Tali) meets others. Among these, I found Myrch to be the most interesting. He’s not like Dun and his other companions in stature or mindset. In fact, he’s a bit shady. He certainly seems to know more than he lets on and that keeps his companions guessing about his true purpose.

Tali was a good addition to the group from the start because she’s an alchemist. This means she’s got healer skills as well as some chemical weapons up her sleeves. I also liked that she was so down to earth, keeping the guys grounded and on target.

Here and there in the story we get some observation notes, as if a scientist is able to peek in on our adventurers and is keeping tabs on them. This gives us some good hints that this is indeed a science fiction tale and it’s just most of our characters don’t know much of science… and any sufficiently advanced technology appears as magic, right? We also get hints as to what kind of species Dun and his folk might be, such as having fur and not being very tall.

The Chakka people were the most disturbing to me, being deliciously creepy indeed! They all seem to be afflicted by some ailment or injury. Tali isn’t exactly sure of the source of their misery but she does her best to help. Meanwhile the story gives us hints of who the meanspirited Overlords might be, though Dun has never met one. In fact, later in the story when the action heats up and there’s some real danger, Dun kind of goes around asking ever so politely, ‘Are you an Overlord?’ to anyone who is particularly cruel. Really, it’s quite quaint and charming.

The story over all has a gentle ramble for the bulk of it. It’s a little slow here and there, though enough troublesome things happen to keep me interested in the welfare of the main characters. Finally, in the last fifth of the book we get some real action with some real consequences. It seems that as more and more tech enters the story, the pacing picks up until by the end we are just going full speed. In fact, one newish character dies and I was like, ‘Hey! What? How?’ I felt I needed a bit more info or build up or some suspense. The death leaves Dun shattered but that seems a bit forced to me because he didn’t know this person long at all, and we readers knew them even less. So there’s no real emotional impact at the end for me. The story does leave everything on a cliffhanger on the edge of a battle. Overall, it was fun. 4/5 stars.

The Narration: Benjamin Fife was a great pick for Dun, sounding like a polite young man who will have his patience and courtesy put to the test again and again. Fife’s female voices sounded like ladies and he various voices for all the characters so that each was distinct. He added in just a handful of sound effects in the second half of the book, like for chattering teeth (which was definitely spooky in a few scenes, as intended) and a few horn sounds too. They worked good with the narration & didn’t drown it out. The pacing was good with the exception of a few odd pauses in the last fifth or sixth of the book, though I was pretty wrapped up in the story at that point so they didn’t matter much. Overall, 4.5/5 stars.

I received this audiobook as part of my participation in a blog tour with Audiobookworm Promotions. The tour is being sponsored by Paul L. Arvidson. The gifting of this audiobook did not affect my opinion of it.