I have a confession to make: I don’t know anything about Dan Ronco, nor had I heard anything about “Unholy Domain” before the author sent me an e-mail, asking if I’d be interested in reading and perhaps reviewing it here on my blog. Me, being the book-loving guy that I am, said, “Yes, please!”, and then I forgot all about it ’till it suddenly appeared in my mailbox. I did some research and discovered that this sci-fi novel was probably right up my alley. The blurbs compared Ronco to a certain Phillip K. Dick and the word on the web seemed pretty good. There was only one thing left to do and that was to read and find out for myself.

Which I’ve now done (obviously), and for all its faults, I found it to be an interesting read.

“Unholy Domain” is a thoroughbred sci-fi thriller set in the year of 2022. Our world has unfortunately taken a turn for the worse after a devastating computer virus named PeaceMaker was released, causing the world’s computers to seize up and effectively shut down… well, everything, really. Millions of people died as a consequence and the world economy went down with them when the American and several other governments passed bills that all but prohibited any further technological advances in order to stop anything like PeaceMaker from happening again. A massive black market for technology sprung up in its wake to fulfil people’s needs, while others turned to religious fanaticism in the form of The Church of Natural Humans, which spoke out against “the Technos, saying that their work was the work of the Devil… and the Anti-Christ is of course the man behind PeaceMaker.

Who, you know, just happens to be the father of the protagonist, David Brown. His father was a brilliant programmer and David has inherited his skills, but even though he tests as a genius, his grades are only mediocre. He can’t settle down with the fact that his father was the man behind something like PeaceMaker, so he decides to find out what really happened ten years ago. The novel proceeds to follow David as he unwinds the mysteries from the past while he gets further and further entangled in a war between two powerful and opposing fractions that are headed straight for each others throats…

“Unholy Domain” is a quick read, clocking in at a respectable 352 pages of fast paced content, and while it doesn’t come close to anything written by Philip K. Dick either thematically or stylistically, it does in the end approach what I’d call a trademark thriller. There’s a lot of well-written action, there are mysteries (who aren’t all that mysterious but the book likes to pretend that they are) and there’s a nice and familiar romance angle that winds down just the way the doctor ordered. Ronco tries with variable success to portray a believable future where technology clashes with the values of a religious mind, which makes for interesting subject material, but I’d say that it was rather poorly executed from a narrative viewpoint. Not only does the author reveal the future of the world via made-up book quotes that head the chapters, rendering the thriller concept nearly impotent from the get-go, but his characterization felt deeply flawed to me. David Brown never managed to become something more than the plot device that he was, and the fanatics on both sides were so fanatic that they seemed alien to me as a reader, thus destroying any chance for me to become as fully immersed in Ronco’s world as I’d like to be.

Another thing that bothered me enough to mention here was the unnecessary, and quite frankly, tasteless comments about sex that all but a couple of PoV’s came with during the novel, and perhaps the worst scene in the whole book came when two unknown characters appeared out of nowhere to, in effect, just rape two female characters, one of which had the classy nickname, “DoubleD”… I can get that some unclassy schmucks could nickname a woman something like “DoubleD” behind her back, but having a woman refer to herself by her cup-size seemed very jarring to me, especially since the woman in question was far from helpless. Ah, well…

All in all I wouldn’t recommend “Unholy Domain”. It’s far from unreadable, it’s just that it’s not very well written and it doesn’t cover its assigned area with enough gusto to become anything close to a “must read”, even if the author appears very knowledgeable in the particular area. However, I don’t regret reading it, because I had a good time reading the entertaining action scenes, and even though I knew what was happening, I thought the last hundred pages marked a step up in quality from the jumbled start.

4.0 /10

Want a second opinion? Check out what Realms of Speculative Fiction had to say about “Unholy Domain”. They do make a good point with the Dan Brown comparison.