The Dark Audiobook By James Herbert cover art

The Dark

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The Dark

By: James Herbert
Narrated by: Sean Barrett
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Night falls. It came like a malignant shadow with seductive promises of power. And somewhere in the night...a small girl smiled as her mother burned...asylum inmates slaughtered their attendants...in slimy tunnels once-human creatures gathered. Madness raged as the lights began to fade and humanity was attacked by an ancient, unstoppable evil.

James Herbert was one of Britain's greatest popular novelists and our #1 best-selling writer of chiller fiction. Widely imitated and hugely influential, he wrote 23 novels which have collectively sold over 54 million copies worldwide and been translated into 34 languages. Born in London in the forties, James Herbert was art director of an advertising agency before turning to writing fiction in 1975. His first novel, The Rats, was an instant best-seller and is now recognised as a classic of popular contemporary fiction.

Herbert went on to publish a new top ten best-seller every year until 1988. He wrote six more best-selling novels in the 1990s and three more since: Once, Nobody True and The Secret of Crickley Hall. Herbert died in March 2013 at the age of 69.

©1980 James Herbert (P)2013 Audible Ltd Genre Fiction Horror Literary Fiction Supernatural Suspense Thriller & Suspense

Editorial reviews

Take the haunting suspense of James Herbert's text, add the chilling timbre of actor, Sean Barrett's voice, and you get an audiobook that must be listened to in one sitting. Long one of Britain's most popular horror writers, James Herbert is at his peak here with The Dark. Similar to his much-celebrated The Fog, the characters in this audiobook are driven to madness and terrifying violence as an amorphous and invisible antagonist descends upon the town. With a sinister performance, Sean Barrett will have listeners frozen over the pause button as the characters try to outlast one of our most primal fears: the dark.

Critic reviews

"Herbert was by no means literary, but his work had a raw urgency. His best novels, The Rats and The Fog,
"There are few things I would like to do less than lie under a cloudy night sky while someone read aloud the more vivid passages of Moon. In the thriller genre, do recommendations come any higher?" (Andrew Postman, The New York Times Book Review)
"Herbert goes out in a blaze of glory" ( Daily Mail)
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The story grabbed me right from the start thanks to the narrator's fantastic voice and ability to make multiple characters come to life.

The ending was a bit of a let down though.

A great listen

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I'm 90% sure the narrator has dentures. The constant smacking noises were so distracting I kept getting lost in the story and since the book jumped from story to story I was never sure who was doing what.

Bad Narrator

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FIRST HERBERT BOOK I HAVE LISTENED TO.....WILL NOT BE THE LAST! ALTHOUGH I WOULD CLASSIFY THIS BOOK AS WEIRD, THE BOOK IS RATHER TWISTED AND MACABRE. THE STORY WAS GOOD BUT WHAT WAS AWESOME WAS THE PSYCHOLOGICAL INSIGHT AND PARAPSYCHOLOGY THEORIES THAT PLAYED OUT IN THE STORY. WILL NOT GIVE AWAY TOO MUCH IN THE BOOK BUT IF I HAD TO COMPARE HERBERT'S WORK WITH ANOTHER AUTHOR IT WOULD BE STEPHEN KING. THE CHARACTER DEPTH, DIALOGUE, AND REACTIONS TO SITUATIONS WERE VERY BELIEVABLE AND SPOT ON.

THIS IS A HORROR BOOK AND NOT FOR THE WEAK OF HEART OR MODEST INDIVIDUAL. WOULD BE A GREAT BOOK THIS HALLOWEEN SEASON!

GREAT SUPERNATURAL MYSTERY!

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hard time finishing this one, the story felt a bit disjointed and long winded.

just average...

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What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you?

If the story had kept up the quality all the way through. Sadly it starts out pretty cool but then devolves into a mess of endless action scenes, overdone splatter and a deus-ex-machina ending that doesn't even make sense.

Would you ever listen to anything by James Herbert again?

No, I don't think so.

What do you think the narrator could have done better?

I like the narrators natural accent, but he also did an accent for one of the characters and I don't like that. It always sounds like mocking to me and instead of drawing me into a story it throws me right out.

What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment?

Disappointment, mostly, and some disgust because there was some moral aspect to the story that seemed to me to demonise sex.

Not as good as I had hoped

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The story felt dated, and old. kind of relied heavily on worn out tropes and as a whole just failed to deliver up to the standard of the authors other works. I really wanted to like it as much as I loved the fog, or the ash series. This was more a drunken muttering than a brilliant work. Then there was the reader, ee gads, took a fairly solid 2 star 'meh' and dropped it 30 stars. a more irritating, muttering accident of voice never did happen. Even pee wee herman would have been a better choice as a reader. Save yourself, read the book if you really want the story.

A 'meh' turned into a 'save me!'

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I love scary stories, especially supernatural ones. But I do not like torture porn, which is what this is.

hated it. couldn't even finish

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