Benjamin Percy

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Esquire Exclusive Excerpt

Posted on April 10, 2013 by ben

The May issue of Esquire features an excerpt — culled from the first 200 pages of Red Moon — called “The Infected.” You can read it online or listen to the audiobook version here.

"Benjamin Percy is one of the most gifted and versatile writers to appear in American publishing in years...His prose has the masculine power of Ernest Hemingway's, but also the sensibilities and compassion of Eudora Welty. His writing is like a meeting of Shakespeare and rock 'n' roll. Benjamin Percy knows how to keep it in E-major, and what a ride it is."

James Lee Burke, bestselling author of Feast Day of Fools, Heaven's Prisoners, and Neon Rain.

Praise

2011 Society of Midlands Authors Award for Fiction

The Wilding is a virtuoso blend of beauty and violence, hope and despair, tough and touching, lust and terror, literary craft and genre plotting. Like James Dickey, Benjamin Percy drags his characters into the wilderness–into a canyon as black as a gaping mouth, where they struggle to stay alive and in control of what makes them human–but for a new generation of readers concerned with the vanishing West.

Danielle Trussoni, authorAngelology and Falling Through the Earth

..powerfully written first novel……he delineates his characters with a knife-sharp psychological edge.

National Public Radio

Chosen as “Book of the Week” at iBooks (10/27/10-11/2/10)

I admire the work of Benjamin Percy for its sheer ferocity and compassion, for its deep empathy for people at the hard edges of rage and grief and fear. The stories in Refresh, Refresh are big-hearted and drunk and dangerous, and there’s a heightened, unnerving vibe as you travel through Percy’s world. You never know where you will end up at the close of a Percy story, but you can be sure that he’ll actually take you somewhere.

Dan Chaon, Author, Among the Missing and You Remind MeMe

THE DARK NET kicked my ass with its deft mash-up of both blackhat hacker culture and black magic. Percy reveals an upgraded, rebooted battle between good versus evil — a fast, fantastic, throat-punch of a read.

Chuck Wendig, NYT bestselling author of Blackbirds and Zer0es

Refresh, Refresh is a completely impressive collection of short fiction by one of our most accomplished younger writers. Benjamin Percy moves instinctively toward the molten center of contemporary writing, the place where genre fiction, in this case horror, overflows its boundaries and becomes something dark and grand and percipient. These stories contain a brutal power and are radiant with pain — only a writer of surpassing honesty and directness could lead us here. Ben Percy’s feet are firmly… Read more

Peter Straub, New York Times-bestselling and Bram Stoker Award-winning Author, In the Night Room, Lost Boy, Lost Girl, Ghost Storyand Koko

The Wilding wraps its arms around some big themes: the vanishing wilderness, a dissolving marriage, and the shell-shocked re-adjustment to domestic life after combat. It’s a lot to pack into 250 pages, but Percy manages to do it with remarkable ease.

Barnes and Noble

Red Moon is a serious, politically symbolic novel – a literary novel about lycanthropes. If George Orwell had imagined a future where the werewolf population had grown to the degree that they were colonized and drugged, this terrifying novel might be it.

John Irving, bestselling author, Cider House Rules, A Prayer for Owen Meanyand The World According to Garp

With RED MOON one of our most blazingly gifted young writers stakes his claim to national attention. Benjamin Percy has one great advantage over most writers who attempt “literary horror”: he understands the literature of real horror from the inside out, and he speaks it like a native. This is a novel with the power to thrill and transport, also to lead the reader well out of her comfort zone and into emotional territory few people have ever seen.

Peter Straub, bestselling author, Ghost Story, Kokoand The Talisman

A Library Media Connection ‘Best of the Best’ for 2009

Listed as one of the Top 100 Books of the Year by the Kansas City Star

REFRESH, REFRESH is full of bravery and bravado, and it fairly crackles with life. These stories mark the beginning of what is bound to be a long and brilliant career for Benjamin Percy. Welcome him.

Ann Patchett, New York Times-bestselling and PEN/Faulkner Award-winning Author, Truth and Beauty, Bel Cantoand The Magician's Assistant

The Wilding is an urgent and haunting look at the darker side of our nature and at our often futile attempts to control and manage the natural world.

Kansas City Star

Benjamin Percy’s THE DARK NET channels the spirit of your favorite sprawling and epic, 1980’s horror/thriller novels into a tightly paced, nasty, unrelenting 21st century nightmare. An addictive and frightening read.

Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and Disappearance at Devil's Rock

Percy is very good at wreaking havoc with his many interconnected plots and then remaking, metaphorically and literally. He is also a courageous realistic who presents unpalatable truths.

Observer-Dispatch

The Wilding is one of the best novels published this fall, and if you haven’t read Percy before, it’s the perfect introduction to a remarkable American voice.

Powells.com

There are a hundred ways to feel frightened and lost in a forest, and the excellent, savvy Benjamin Percy can evoke them all. THE WILDING, a brilliant literary novel that feels at times almost like Geoffrey Household’s classic Rogue Male, seems to have been written on his vibrating nerve-endings. This book is filled with dread, sadness, tension and a tireless vision of mankind’s thoughtless devastation of an ancient and more authentic way of life. It is almost impossible to put down. James Dicke… Read more

Peter Straub, bestselling author, Ghost Story, A Dark Matterand Shadowland

Benjamin Percy is interested in grace, transcendence, the sudden moments in lives when a glow of feeling appears, brightens the chasm, goes dark again, or doesn’t. He has a fabulous eye for detail, the names of things, weeds, weapons, machines, and renders superbly the revelatory shadings of character. In REFRESH, REFRESH he is unafraid of story, plot, and writes of plain lives in crisis without blinking, in sinewy, rippling prose, the rhythms of his sentences ever taking us more deeply inside.… Read more

Daniel Woodrell, Pen/West Award-winning Author, Tomato Red, Winter's Bone, and The DeathSweet Mister

“Wildly entertaining and highly original melange of northern Minnesota lore and slam-bang near-future SF action…Percy’s dead-on local color, strong central characters, and well integrated flashbacks into the making of a modern samurai will delight and entertain both comics fans and serious science fiction readers. This is an impressive series starter.” –Publishers Weekly starred review

Comet Cycle - PW

The Wilding is a compelling action narrative, universal in its dimensions while utterly grounded in specific particulars. Ben Percy is a stunning storyteller. His fearful wildernesses, both physical and psychic, kept me up through the night.

William Kittredge, authorHole in the Sky and The Willow Field

Chosen as one of “The Six Best Books in the West of 2010” – New West Books & Writers

Not your father’s eco-novel. In compelling, image-driven prose, Ben Percy confounds the old polarities about wilderness and development by sending three generations of men into a doomed canyon, and letting so much hell break lose we can’t tell the heros from the villians–which feels exactly right. This is a dark, sly, honest, pleasing, slip-under-your-skin-and-stay-there kind of a book.

Pam Houston, bestselling authorCowboys are My Weakness and Sighthound

Benjamin Percy’s The Wilding is a tour de force meditation and treatise on the nature of violence, the violence of nature, man in the wild, and the wild in man—cleverly disguised as a page-turning adventure. Not just a “must” read, but a need read, this book is timely, terrifying, terrific.

Antonya Nelson, author, In the LandMen and Female Trouble

“Take one part dystopia, one part sci-fi, two parts apocalypse, then ride them roughshod through a bleak and bloody western, and it still wouldn’t get close to what Ben Percy does here, which is blow open the core of humanity’s dark heart.” -Marlon James, Booker Prize award-winning author of Black Leopard, Red Wolf

Comet Cycle - James

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