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Home > Categories > Books > Fiction > The Dark Fields review
Imagine a drug that makes your brain function fantastically efficiently, tapping into your fundamental resources of intelligence and drive. Imagine a drug that lets you learn a foreign language in a day. Imagine a drug that makes you process information so fast you can see patterns in the stock market.
Eddie Spinola is on such a drug. It's called MDT-48. It's a viagra for the brain, a designer drug that's redesigning his life.
But while the drug is helping Eddie make the sort of money he's only dreamed about, he's also beginning to suffer some ominous side-effects. And when he tries to trace the other users, to find out how he can kick his addiction, he discovers a terrifying truth. Some of them are dying. And those that aren't already dead...
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Review by: tucker (Karl)
Dated: 9th of June, 2004
For a first-novel, this is an astounding debut. An impressive tale, told with such detail and skill that it was all too easy to fall into this story and simple 'be there' page after page.
With the huge quantity of designer drugs sprouting from the numerous druglabs scattered around the planet, a picture as scary as this story paints is possible, too possible, and we would probably be as blind to it as the characters so realistically brought to life here.
However, I would not agree that MDT-48 was a 'viagra for the brain' - viagra doesn't work that way. I would class this fictional (?!) drug to be more of a turbo-charger, it opens all the doors inside the mind and then slaps the whole lot into top gear.
Overall, I wouldn't say this was one of the best fictional stories I have ever read... because it strikes me as too real for comfort. I found it somewhat disturbing to realise that this could be more fact than fiction perhaps. But I was still enthralled by the story, by the transformations wrought in Eddie, from slob to superman in one easy pill.
Having firsthand knowledge of how easy it is to fall into addiction, and how difficult it can be to kick, I 'felt' for Eddie Spinola on a level few who have never felt the emotional weight of an addiction could understand.
A top-notch book, that cunningly gives a wake-up call to those who have been in such dark places, and an insider's view to those who haven't.
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"Character - the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life - is the source from which self respect springs."
Joan Didion (1934 - ), 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem'
