Vroege RecensentenEric Barnes

A mesmerizing novel about a modern day dystopia, as six sets of people move through a landscape and a country beginning to show the signs of profound and awful change. “Barnes’ spare and chilling prose flows from one horrific scene to another without, surprisingly, alienating his readers, perhaps because the heart of his narrative ultimately reveals an abiding faith in the power of human compassion. A first-rate apocalyptic page-turner.” - Booklist “In twenty years—or less—people will have a hard time believing that this is a work of the imagination; that's how convincingly Barnes plays out the signs and omens of our times. That he conjures this dark forecast without ever naming a soul or the cities they live in does not make the story more otherworldly, but only more chillingly recognizable.” - Tim Johnston, NY Times bestselling author of THE CURRENT “Above the Ether depicts a dystopia more terrifying because of its proximity to our own, yet this novel is also saturated by hope. In this world, people can rise above their pasts, and humanity can endure change and hardship. Barnes is also just a terrific writer of both story and sentence.” - Elise Blackwell, author of THE LOWER QUARTER and HUNGER “The world of Eric Barnes’ novel Above the Ether suffers destruction of Biblical proportions. Flood, fire, pestilence, famine — the rolling cataclysms have an Old Testament tenor and scope. Though the novel builds in intensity as the story lines interweave, it derives its power from the poetic quality of its language.” - Chapter 16

Something Pretty, Something Beautiful is a novel about bare and common violence. About the simple horrors taking place in the house that's down the street. The house along the road you drive past every day. -- Signed Copies -- “[A] remarkable book. … This is a world where the pull of friendship is far stronger than the pull of family, where cars are freedom, stories are everything, and home is thick with ghosts.” - Emily St. John Mandel, The Millions “The new novel chronicles in stark, effective prose a boy’s tragic discoveries about how friendship works.” - Peggy Burch, The Commercial Appeal “Elegantly constructed and lovingly, tenderly, savagely written…. The most harrowing portrait of American boys careening into manhood that I’ve ever read.” - Benjamin Whitmer, Satan Is Real “…the book’s impressionistic, running narrative, the immediacy and matter-of-factness of its full-throttle prose.” - Leonard Gill, The Flyer Learn more at www.ericbarnes.net

In just three years, CEO Robbie Case has grown Core Communications, a data technology company, from 30 people to over 5,000. Now a $20 billion company made legendary by its sudden success, Core is based on a technology no other company can come close to copying, a revolutionary breakthrough known as “drawing blood from a mainframe.” And Robbie, its 35-year-old CEO, is acclaimed worldwide for his vision, leadership and wealth. Except that all of it is based on a lie. The technology doesn’t work, the finances are built on a Ponzi scheme of stock sales and shell corporations, and Robbie is struggling to keep the company alive, to protect the friends who work for him and all that they’ve built. Each day, Robbie tries to push the catastrophe back a little further, while his employees believe that they are all moving closer to “grace,” the day their stock options vest, when they will be made rich for their faith and loyalty and hard work. The details of the lie are all keyed into a shadowy interface that Robbie calls Shimmer, an omniscient mainframe that hides itself, calculates its own collapse, threatens to outsmart its creator and to reveal the corporation’s illegal, fragile underpinnings. Shimmer is the story of a high-tech crusade nearing its end. The shell game Robbie has created is finally running out of room. And Robbie is the only one who knows or who has a chance to make things right. Or is he? A breathless debut novel that charges the atmosphere with suspense and surprise and delivers complex characters you can root for in spite of their flaws, Shimmer is Robbie’s race against the truth.