Howling Dark
Written by Christopher Ruocchio
Narrated by Samuel Roukin
4.5/5
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About this audiobook
Christopher Ruocchio
Christopher Ruocchio is the internationally award-winning author of The Sun Eater, a space opera fantasy series, and the former Junior Editor at Baen Books, where he edited several anthologies. His work has also appeared in Marvel comics. He is a graduate of North Carolina State University, where he studied English Rhetoric and the Classics. Christopher has been writing since he was eight and sold his first novel, Empire of Silence, at twenty-two. His books have appeared in five languages. Christopher lives in Raleigh, North Carolina with his wife, Jenna.
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Titles in the series (7)
Howling Dark Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Empire of Silence Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Demon in White Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Kingdoms of Death Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Queen Amid Ashes Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Dregs of Empire Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Ashes of Man Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
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Reviews for Howling Dark
44 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Better than the first book. Sometimes the dialogue goes on too long, but there was good action at the end of this novel. As a Christain, I don't like the author borrowing Christain theology and sacramentals and instilling it in an Earth cult.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5First, I have to state, this is not the type of book I normally read. A long saga that reminds me very much of of something like Marco Polo. The character is not a hero. He wants to be but forced into circumstances he cannot control, he is forced into situations no one should have to make when he seeks adventure and a way of life different from the one he was born to have. The story is so complex you forget it is science fiction. If you are looking for an exceptional book let me recommend this series.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5“Within those chilly sepulchers the Cielcin slept, suspended between binary heartbeats like wights awaiting the blood moon to rise again and walk and drink the blood of men.” In “Howling Dark” by Christopher Ruocchio "’SF's no good,’ they bellow till we're deaf.‘But this looks good.’ – "Well then, it's not SF." In “Relapse 18” (eFanzine) by Robert Conquest, circa 1962 So, what else is new?Is Ruocchio’s “Howling Dark” SF or is it something else?Let’s get this out of the way first. I’ve read a few idiots bitching about the use of stream-of-consciousness in this novel. Yes, I know, these nincompoops are not used to reading SF more complicated than “The Hunger Games”… Ruocchio is doing it in a different way: maybe a "stream of pre-consciousness" or “sub-verbal stream-of-consciousness”, i.e., before thought becomes articulate speech. In this kind of stream-of-consciousness one must read “faster”, almost skimming, to get the meaning, rather than trying to think about every word and its place and function in the sentence. In some ways this is exactly the opposite of stream-of-consciousness.One of the sad facts is that SF has not always attracted the best writers (nor the best of readers…). But then, what is a "best writer" or a “best reader” come to that? Like art and music, beauty is a notion experienced by the beholder. It may sound a bit extreme, but I cannot tolerate even a single sentence by Terry Pratchett, but I can wallow for days on end in the writing of Virginia Woolf. And there are those who think Wolff just drifts and rambles, while Pratchett is incisive and poignant.Unfortunately, we tend to be guided by things like “The Penguin Book of English Literature” (or anything similar), which in turn informs school, college, and university curricula. Popularity is a sure sign of a deficit of aesthetic value (a “big slice of the market” bespeaks the values of the salesperson, not those of the literary artist).Search and replacing door with airlock does not make you a science fiction writer. The problem with the themes of science and technology is that these days, people simply do not find them important to their lives. It's not as if they have radically changed the readers’ lives and provide the only realistic solutions to the looming and numerous problems of the future.Just cast an eye over the authors of Science Fiction and the low quality will be apparent. Here's a short list of these “hacks”: George Orwell (“1984”); Aldous Huxley (“Brave New World”); Rex Warner (“The Aerodrome”); Yevgeny Zamyatin (“We”); Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (“Roadside Picnic”); JG Ballard (“The Drowned World”); HG Wells (“The War of the Worlds”); Octavia Butler (“Kindred”); Kazuo Ishiguro (“Never Let Me Go”); L.P. Hartley (“Facial Justice”); Christopher Priest (“The Gradual”, “The Adjacent”, etc.) E.M. Forster (“The Machine Stops”); Kurt Vonnegut (“Harrison Bergeron”); Christopher Ruocchio (“The Empire of Silence”, “Howling Dark”). I could go on. It's terrible that people should read such trash instead of the literary masters…Why does “Howling Dark” belong in this August category you might say? Ah, that would be telling (apart from I said in the first paragraph of this post)…go read it please because nothing I’d say would make the book justice in a SFional context. And forget what some idiots are saying about it.Snobbery (or anti-snobbery) in literature is as much a nuisance as it is in catering. Some people seem to think books are only good if they are incomprehensibly written and contain no story (like “The Hunger Games” which is utter crap). And then we have books like the “Howling Dark”. Unfortunately the common SF reader likes to read uncritically, i.e., stuff that reproduces lots of old tropes and historical systems without thinking much about them. SF = Speculative Fiction.