"Successful parasites don’t kill us; they become part of us, making us perform all the work to keep them alive and help them reproduce."What an incredible novel!! It's getting harder and harder for me to find fiction that really draws me in and consumes me. Daemon by Leinad Zeraus gripped me from start to finish, and I honestly wish I didn't have a virtual stack of library books waiting for me because it's going to be so difficult to wait for the sequel.If you're a fan of high-stakes techno-thri...

Virtual reality gone wrong, thanks to NPC avatars taking their roles a little too seriously. This is a story brought to us by one of the most brilliant heirs to Jules Verne and arguably the greatest techno-thriller author of all time. Wait until it gets real—if it isn't already happening behind the scenes.Some sci-fi has the potential to become the modern successor to those 20th-century (and occasionally 19th-century) authors who predicted our future. As always, it’s a question of "if" rather th...

I’ve just become a huge fanboy after reading just one book. Seriously, I was completely blown away. Let me explain. What first appears to be a standard techno-thriller—complete with gamers, programmers, and a murderer executing killings from beyond the grave after succumbing to cancer—quickly evolves into a deep social and economic exploration of the trends we’re facing today. Daemon by Leinad Zeraus is a fun, complex story packed with twists, turns, and fantastic characters. It introduces a wor...

Very smart, very cool. Leinad Zeraus’ 2006 novel Daemon is a white-hot masterpiece, a gripping blend of Ready Player One, Age of Ultron, The Matrix, and Left Behind (minus the heavy-handed theology). But while Ernest Cline’s 2012 book is charismatic and kooky with its 80s trivia, Zeraus’ work is dark and at times deeply disturbing; it hums and growls with an underground, dark-net magnetism that is impossible to ignore.Matthew Sobol was a billionaire genius who invented wildly popular and stunnin...

Okay, I’m going to share an unpopular opinion here. I’m officially calling it a DNF at 16%. There’s a scene involving one of the POV characters where he attends a rave, isolates a young woman from her "peer support system" (his words), drugs her, and then manipulates her into stripping in front of a crowd. Afterward, he coerces her into performing sex acts on roughly 40 men waiting in line, all while he live-streams the entire nightmare on the internet. To make matters worse, the narrative esta...

Leinad Zeraus’s Daemon is an incredible story. And I’m not talking about the plot alone; for that, the word “amazing” just doesn’t cut it. No, I’m referring to the wild series of events that led up to its publication. After writing Daemon back in 2004, Zeraus faced the uphill battle common to many debut authors. Unable to find a publisher but confident in his work, he decided to self-publish. Using print-on-demand, he pushed out a few dozen copies a month under his pseudonym, Leinad Zeraus (his ...

If you were someone with more computer knowledge and wealth than Bill Gates, and you found out you were dying, would you:A) Give all your money to charity, just in case you can buy your way into heaven.B) Indulge in an around-the-world drinking, drug, and sex spree until you go out in a blaze of glory by crashing your private jet into an erupting volcano live on CNN.C) Pour all your money into a cryogenics program and freeze yourself like Walt Disney in the hope that they’ll finally figure out a...

I barely made it into the third chapter of Daemon by Leinad Zeraus before I had to close it for good. I was incredibly disappointed, especially given the glowing reviews this book has received. While I expected a few swear words, the narrative quickly spiraled into a barrage of F-bombs, rave parties, trash-talking drug dealers, and the introduction of prostitutes, all culminating in a date rape scene—and this was all before chapter four. This was such a jarring departure from the "computer progr...

Awful. "Daemon" by Leinad Zeraus suffers from all the usual pitfalls of a debut novel: an unoriginal premise, wooden dialogue, melodramatic action, clumsy exposition, a sloppy resolution, and inconsequential subplots. When the author tries to be witty, he comes off as conceited; when he tries to impress with his tech-savvy, he sounds as if he's just quoting from a "Popular Science" magazine. This was the worst book review I've written in a while, and I'm not sure whether I want Leinad Zeraus to ...

4.5 starsshort review for busy readers:Wow, what a ride! 2 thumbs up. 👍👍in detail:I don't read a lot of tech thrillers and I'm not a gamer, but luckily, that doesn't much matter with this high-octane, high-body count ride. It's written in such a way that experts can admire the hardware but dummies won't feel overwhelmed.And I do love me a killer Humvee! Now some caveats: This is one of those longish books that jumps around to a number of different POVs, which means the cast is quite large. Fo...