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K.M. Rice

Darkling Kindle Edition

by K.M. Rice (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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How far would you go to save your family?

Midsummer used to be a day of feasts and bonfires. A day when cares were set aside for the joy of grass between our toes, warm hands in our palms, laughter in our hearts. Our celebrations dimmed with the light. Something upset the balance of our woods. Something so deep that even our bonfires can’t lure the sun back. And he has something to do with it. Of that we’re sure, which is why I’m being given to him.

DARKLING is K.M. Rice's suspenseful debut novel about a young woman's sacrifice to save her village and the unexpected strength that comes from first love.

K.M. Rice is a national award-winning screenwriter and author who has worked for both Magic Leap and Weta Workshop. Her first novel, Darkling, is a young adult dark fantasy that now has a companion novel titled The Watcher.

Print length

229 pages
Language

English
Sticky notes

On Kindle Scribe
Publication date

November 8, 2013
File size

4063 KB
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Enabled
Word Wise

Enabled
Enhanced typesetting

Enabled
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"A haunting, creeping, wonderful story." -Sir Richard Taylor, Weta Workshop (Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit) Geek League of America Podcast, October 15th, 2014.

About the Author

K.M. Rice is a national award-winning screenwriter and author who has worked for both Magic Leap and Weta Workshop. Her first novel, Darkling, is a young adult dark fantasy that now has a companion novel titled The Watcher.

Her novella The Wild Frontier is an ode to the American spirit of adventure and seeks to awaken the wildish nature in all of us. She also provided additional writing and research for Middle-earth From Script to Screen: Building the World of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. Her upcoming Afterworld series is set to debut with the first book, Ophelia.

Over the years, her love of storytelling has led to producing and geeking out in various webshows and short films. When not writing or filming, she can be found hiking in the woods, baking, running, and enjoying the company of the many animals on her family ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00DMNZIEA
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Wildling Spirit; 2nd edition (November 8, 2013)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ November 8, 2013
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 4063 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 229 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #1,604,827 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #922 in Gaslamp Fantasy (Books)
- #10,745 in Dark Fantasy Horror
- #17,736 in Dark Fantasy

Customer Reviews:
81 ratings

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K.M. Rice

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Official website: http://www.kmrice.com/

Newsletter (Wildling Adventures!): http://tinyurl.com/hdedqv9

K.M. Rice is a national award-winning screenwriter and author. Defying literary conventions and genres, the defining element of Rice's work to date has been the touch of whimsy she brings to every story she tells. They will take you from hauntings in the woods, the rugged American West, the cliffs of Ireland, and across dozens of eras.

Her four-part Afterworld series continues with the second book, Priestess.

Her first novel, Darkling, is a young adult dark fantasy that now has a companion novel titled The Watcher. Her novella The Wild Frontier is an ode to the American spirit of adventure and seeks to awaken the wildish nature in all of us. Black Irish, a dark comedy, highlights contemporary political drama in the emerald isle. She also provided additional writing and research for Middle-earth From Script to Screen: Building the World of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.

Over the years, her love of storytelling has led to producing and geeking out in various webshows and short films, along with working for both Magic Leap and Weta Workshop. When not writing or filming, she can be found hiking in the woods, baking, running, and enjoying the company of the many animals on her family ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California.

Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5

81 global ratings

5 star		62%
4 star		17%
3 star		9%
2 star		8%
1 star		4%

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Top reviews from the United States

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K. Bird Lincoln

compelling narrator voice, nice creepiness, main emtotional relationship fell flat for me

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 9, 2018

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3.5 stars, actually for me and my personal tastes

This is kind of a beauty and the beast retelling where a girl goes to sacrifice herself to a mysterious "dark creature" in a mansion (overgrown with roses) near her village and ends up having a strong emotional relationship with the creature instead.

Willow has a falconer best friend, a mysteriously absent adored older sister, and as the book starts, a mother who is dressing her for a "sacrifice." Willow lives in a village in the woods that has no sun...thus plants and herds are dying.

They think a mysterious forest creature is the cause of this, and have tried sacrificing animals, but now have upped the ante to humans. (And here begins the fuzziness that lead me to 3.5 stars despite the strong, compelling voice of Willow, our plucky narrator. The village is sacrificing her? Her parents go along with this after the mysterious loss of their other daughter? If the animals didn't work, why humans? If the mansion is so close, why haven't the hunters checked it out before?)

The dark creature turns out to be a tormented soul, and of course Willow must save him.

There's more fuzziness in the exact nature of what the darkling is, and how he controls his appearance, and how he is supposed to fight off the thing tormenting him. There's alot of creepiness in the way Willow goes around the house in constant danger, and most of the book is Willow and the darkling finding out about each other's histories.

But the biggest fuzziness for me was the darkling. He was very.....unsolid for me as a character. He kind of just reacted to Willow's demands and the tormentor's demands and had little say for himself other than explaining his backstory. And so for me the emotional connection between Willow and the darkling fell flat. I like beta heroes, but he was super-beta.

So not to my taste.

Helpful

D. Beckmann

A promising debut! A very good Gothic novel.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 28, 2013

Verified Purchase

Cupid and Psyche (or better, Till We Have Faces), a bit of Wuthering Heights, a good dose of Jane Eyre, and a lot of The Sixth Sense, all mixed together in an imaginary world where the lines between life and death, the physical and the spiritual, barely exist.

A young woman believes she must give up her life to save her family - even her whole village - from a mysterious evil darkness that is leading to their ruin. But in her act of self-sacrificial giving - an important theme in the story - she initiates a train of circumstances that leads to dramatic insights concerning the people around her and about herself.

Miss Rice has done a good job composing a complex plot that gives scope for reflection upon human nature. The story is scary and a bit steamy in one place - though not in a degrading or defrauding way, thankfully - and therefore is for mature readers. There is a surprise revelation - I will not say where! - that is almost too much at once, but it is not a long novel; progress in the plot needs to be made. However, the revelation does work in the world she depicts and it sets the stage for an unexpected, and I would say solid and pleasing, resolution to the story.

Stayed up til 3:00 a.m. reading it. It's better than The Woman in Black. If you like something a bit on the Gothic side with a vein of redemption, then get the book.

5 people found this helpful

Helpful

E.F.B.

Excellent writing but the story itself wasn't really my thing. Still, it has good qualities.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 20, 2014

Verified Purchase

Darkling is very well written and in many ways a highly compelling story with some great lessons about life, love, and loss, but it is, at it's core, a ghost story and I think it needs to be known that it does get pretty scary and even a bit dark at times. If you like scary stories that can give you chills then you will love Darkling! (Just don't read it at bedtime!)

However, this was actually one of the reasons I only gave it 3 stars. I didn't know it was a ghost story and had I known I wouldn't have bought it because I quite simply don't like scary stories. Still, I gave this book every chance possible to win me over and I admit the quality of writing, depth of the story and it's beautiful heart forced me to push past the creepy factor and finish the story because I just HAD to know what happened. Without spoiling anything, it has a lovely happy ending and that is something that is important to me.

Conclusion: Because I'm not a fan of ghost stories in general, I will be passing Darkling on to someone who will enjoy it for what it is more than I did. But if you like stories that are scary but still have heart then please give it a chance. K.M. Rice is a excellent author and I can see her career soaring to great heights someday.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Steven Armstrong

Darkling: A Dark and Touching Tale of Love, Loss, and Life

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 12, 2013

Verified Purchase

This chilling and emotionally compelling story is one of a young woman on a quest to save her family and her village from the suffering of starvation and the dread of darkness. In the process, she ends up doing so much more than she could have imagined, while managing to find a light that gives her hope among the darkness that surrounds her.

K.M. Rice is a born storyteller. The world she has created is fully realized and the characters so developed that they nearly leap off the page! This is what you want. You want to feel as if these characters live and breathe in the space they occupy and Ms. Rice's characters do this. The pacing of the story is expertly managed and the craftsmanship clearly shows that Ms. Rice has a gift and could do this in her sleep. The relationship dynamics between characters is moving, the environments richly described, the story is well told and like a magician, Ms. Rice has cast a spell. If you expect this to be a ho-hum quick read, I warn you dear reader, you may be in tears by the end. Darkling is a wonderful debut novel and would make a fantastic movie!

K.M. Rice wrote the heck out of this!

3 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Kat Davis

Excellent read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 10, 2018

Verified Purchase

I don’t normally read YA novels, but I had watched a few of the author’s writing vlogs and was impressed by her passion for the craft of writing so I decided to give her a read. Darkling tells the story of an isolated mountain village plunged into perpetual darkness by an unknown source. On the verge of starvation, the villagers decide to make sacrifices to the Bringer (of darkness) they believe must be in the woods as that is where the darkness began. When animals fail to satisfy, a young girl, Willow, steps forward to act as a human sacrifice, to give herself to the Bringer hoping to lift the darkness. Willow is different. She is a Listener, she can hear the dead. She feels she has the best chance to save the village because of her unique talent. What follows is an inspiring tale of love, grief, horror, and fear of the ‘other’.

K.M.Rice has a unique way with words, almost poetic in their cadence and style. This expressive word use is refreshing and certainly paints images in the reader’s mind. The pace of the novel was well kept, with suspense and intrigue weaving their way through the plot.

K.M. Rice engages multiple senses in her writing. We not only see things, but we smell them, feel them creeping on our skin, and hear them whispering in our ear. Entire scenes blossom before us and the world becomes real. By the conclusion of the novel, the reader (or at least this reader) feels they are reading a series of undulating emotional waves which set us up perfectly for the conclusion.

There were, however, a few issues that pulled me out of the story at times. These included word repetition, POV/author leakage, and a few erroneous words affecting style. In conclusion, this was an excellent read. I can actually see it as a Tim Burton production, the atmosphere suits his style of animation perfectly. I would definitely recommend this to readers who enjoy dark fantasy, the paranormal and things with a metaphysical bent. I will read more by K.M. Rice.

I have written a longer review on Goodreads giving examples of things, but it is too long for Amazon and I can't link to it here.

Maddy Churchhouse

Fantasy, romance and horror mixed into one

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 14, 2020

Verified Purchase

I love KM Rice's YouTube channel and that brought me to this book. I have to admit that I wasn't sure about it at first. I was struggling to connect with Willow, or feel any dramatic tension about the seemingly random events in the haunted house. However, the story gets much stronger about the half way mark, once you get to know Tristan, and you can become much more invested in the characters. I especially began to enjoy myself once Willow finds out the truth about the tormenting ghost, and then the bringer of darkness. These reveals were both very satisfying, and from then on I was invested reading straight through to the exciting climax. The ending took me by surprise and was bittersweet. Seriously though, I could have smacked Gwen! Willow girl, you forgive too easily...

Amazon Customer

100% recommended! One of my favourite books

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 22, 2016

Verified Purchase

I'm a huge fan of the stream-of-consciousness approach the author takes to her work. This story, I gather, arrived suddenly in her mind, and the words poured torrent-like onto the page, without plan or even theme at its beginning. This was reflected in my reading of it, in the sense that right the way through I had the feeling that here was a ride which could propel me anywhere. It was true adventure. Indeed, it took me to places I wished it hadn't at the time, but upon reaching the end I felt exhausted, relieved, fulfilled and thrilled -- much like, I bet, the author felt after she'd finished writing it. I'm very glad to have taken this amazing journey with her. Looking forward to the next very much.

Pip

Bought when released, will still re-read.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 29, 2017

Verified Purchase

A chilling story I am about to revisit after reading the companion novel the Watcher.

Grief, anger, love, loss, and hope. This tale still delights read after read.

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Darkling Kindle Edition

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