Benjamin Percy

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by Benjamin Percy

The Dead Lands

The Dark Net

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"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

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 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

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 debut novel, The Wilding, reaches out and mauls you like a raging grizzly bear.

Ames Tribune

Written in vivid, often lyrical prose, but with exhilarating comic-book energy, THE DARK NET is a megawatt defibrillator to the reader’s heart. Quirky but very human characters confront an explosive emergence of the supernatural into our world, in this imaginative, spooky, swiftly paced tale threaded through with dark humor.

Dean Koontz

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

Percy’s writing in this novel is recklessly passionate, ferocious and fast-paced, but his thinking about these subjects is profound and carefully reasoned.

Hayden's Ferry Review

Named a Most Anticipated SFF Fiction Book by New Scientist, Gizmodo, Vol 1 Brooklyn, the A.V. Club, and Tor.com

New Scientist

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

The Dead Lands is a bomb-blast of a novel, casting its tremors in every direction. Benjamin Percy’s range grows broader with every book he writes. Here he takes a journey across a cataclysmic future American West, sending his band of seekers, scholars, assassins, and explorers through a landscape as dangerous and surreal as it must have seemed to the original Lewis and Clark. Their adventure, like the novel itself, travels far past the frontier, into the deepest and most thrilling of wildernesse… Read more

Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Brief History of the Dead and The Illumination

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

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

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

…his writing is as natural, dark, and deep as the woods he writes about. At 31, Percy is as promising a writer as anyone on a certain New York magazine’s list of promising writers under 40.

The Boston Globe

“There’s no other way to say it: Ben Percy has written a stunner, a genre-bending novel of suspense and terror but with Percy’s usual force-of-nature language and his deep insights into character. I cannot recommend this novel highly enough, nor could I put it down.” — Tom Franklin, author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, Hell at the Breech and Poachers.

Tom Franklin, author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter and Hell at the Breech

This post-apocalytpic reimagining of the Lewis and Clark passage is a thrill ride through a nightmare America. Gorgeous and haunting and full of heart, like some wonderful offspring of The Hobbit, The Road, and Stephen King’s Dark Towers series.

James Frey, New York Times-bestselling author of Endgame and A Million Little Pieces

“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

Benjamin Percy is one of the most gifted and versatile writers to appear in American publishing in years. His degree of craft and natural talent are extraordinary; his ear for language is absolutely perfect. 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, Feast Day of Fools, Heaven's Prisonersand Neon Rain

“Whether you choose to think of him as the Elmore Leonard of rural Minnesota or the Stephen King of Science Fiction, Ben Percy — with his extraordinary and unrelenting eye — dishes up humanity like some kind of otherworldly blue plate special, at once deeply familiar and wildly new.” -Margaret Stohl, #1 New York Times bestselling author

Comet Cycle - Stohl

Just as Percy demonstrates how men manage danger, he’s equally adept at revealing the odd ways men also create it. Percy’s rendering of their psychological dance is masterful.

Orion

The Wilding emerges as creative, unique and deeply thought-provoking. More so, it speaks of an author with many more tricks up his sleeve.

Bookpage

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 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

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

2011 Society of Midlands Authors Award for Fiction

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Bio
▼
- Interviews
- Recognition
Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction
▼
- …at indiebound
- …at Amazon
Novels
▼
Comics
▼
Film/TV/Podcasts
Other Works
▼
Contact
▼
- Appearances

Benjamin Percy

The Wilding

Red Moon

The Dead Lands

The Dark Net