CATALYST PRESS
DARK VIDEO
ISBN 978-1946395-2-14 | trade paper | $16.00 | publication date Jan 2020
“I want to show you something. These are the money shots. It’s the face. The expression. When realization sets in.”
A minibus taxi flipping spectacularly on its head; two teenagers engaged in illicit sex in a shopping-mall rest room; a raunchy table dance in a Cape Town strip club....What have these scenes got to do with a beautiful young woman running through Newlands Forest early on a Sunday morning?
Alistair Morgan is the key. A gifted law student with a glittering career in the offing, Alistair seems to have it all: looks, charm and money—and the attention of the hottest girls on campus. But his privileged lifestyle is about to be turned upside down as he is lured deeper and deeper into the sinister online world of Dark Video, where reality blurs and morals unravel.
Set in the mid to late 2000s, just as YouTube and other video sharing sites were getting started, Dark Video explores the most disturbing and darkest corners of the digital world, where some people will pay for unimaginable videos and others make money in the most depraved way possible.
From the ominous slopes of Table Mountain and the murky depths of False Bay to a dusty Karoo farm and the limestone cliffs of Arniston, Dark Video is an intense international thriller that will keep you spellbound from the word go.
REVIEWS
“Church paces his novel fast enough to keep readers turning pages, asking us to slide down the same slippery slope as his characters [...] [H]ow big is the jump from reading about fictional characters, to watching fictional characters, to watching real people suffer acts of violence? If someone with a camera happens to be there when it happens, what’s the harm?
Church may not provide an answer, but he does explore the world in which it can happen, bringing his readers along for the ride.” —New York Journal of Books
“A topical thriller with a strong moral message that should get the conversation going among a diverse audience.” —Barbara Erasmus, Sunday Times
“Compulsory reading for every parent who is uninformed or bothered about the potential of technology to wreak utter havoc in a person’s life” —Cape Town Book Fair
“Dark Video is not a crime novel, with police and bad guys trying to keep one step ahead of each other. His book charts a descent, act by act, into a swirling world of amorality, until the way back is lost. Think of Stephen King’s Apt Pupil, or of Lord of the Flies played out underneath Rhodes Memorial.” —Tim Richman, author 50 People Who Messed up the World
“Church’s shark-haunted thriller merely displaces the terrestrial violence of Cape Town on to an even more savage sea.” —Hermann Wittenberg, professor Ecocritical Writing, South African Literature, and Digital Culture, University of the Western Cape
Peter Church is a South African fiction novelist renowned for the dark and racy nature of his writing. His debut novel, Dark Video, was published by Random House in South Africa and Australia in 2008, and delved into a sordid world of online video sharing. This was followed up in 2011 with Bitter Pill, a thriller dealing with the scourge of drink spiking on the local club scene. Bitter Pill was long listed for the Sunday Times Fiction Prize in the same year. Church lives in Cape Town with his wife, the artist Paula Church, and three children. He is a member of SA’s PEN association of writers and his short stories have been published in a number of local anthologies. Learn more about Peter at his website and follow him on Facebook.
AUTHOR PETER CHURCH
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