Nicholas Bain
The Netroom Predator
Michael and Karen Alexander are the perfect Silicon Valley yuppie couple. Like millions of other Americans, their lives revolve around the internet. On one hand, Michael is the faithful and happily married husband, but when he plays on the internet, things change and the real world and the cyber world merge into a nightmare.
When dark chat room fantasies become reality, cyber-sex, taboos, affairs, and even murder soon encompass their lives. THE NETROOM PREDATOR is a captivating and thrilling story, which plummets the reader into the chilling dark side of the cyber world. It is sexy, mysterious, and unpredictable as it follows the terrifying awakening of a psychotic internet serial killer.
Reviews and Awards:
Honorable Mention Winner in the General Fiction Category Hollywood Book Festival 7-27-2007.
Joe Taylor of ForeWord CLARION Reviews rates it 5 STARS (*****):
"Nicholas Bain's first novel could accurately be called a cyber-thriller, although it is nicely unencumbered by hacker jargon or high technology specs. Bain sometimes takes readers into the chatroom, where identity often goes no deeper than a screenname and a borrowed photograph. But his young, upscale, and sexually uninhibited characters are more often found lounging in the cafes, bistros, and brewpubs of the Bay area."
http://www.forewordmagazine.com/clarion/viewreviews.aspx?reviewID=241
C. Dina of Script Viking wrote this about the book:
“When I read this I thought of “Single White Female” and even “The Hand That Rocks The Cradle”--stories of how far our jealous and vengeful nature can take us if we allow it. On the whole, this novel has a gem of a psychological thriller in it.”
Check out Nicholas Bain's website:
http://www.nicholasbain.com
Contact Nicholas at:
http://www.myspace.com/nicholasbain
Born in the mountains of rural Appalachia, Nicholas grew up in a small town in West Virginia. With five brothers and five sisters, he was the tenth of eleven children. “If you watched the Walton’s,” he says, “then you probably have an idea of my childhood life. I grew up in a loving family environment that was financially poor, but rich in love. We didn’t have a lot, but we cherished what we had.”
As an undergraduate he was the Sports Editor for the college newspaper, and also the Editor for the college yearbook. Ultimately he chose a Business degree over a Journalism degree, but his passion for writing remained untouched. Armed with a BS in Business Administration, he embarked on a successful career and moved to Florida where he worked for a distributor, a non-profit agency for the developmentally disabled, and two entertainment companies.
In 1996 he moved to San Francisco, where he currently resides. There he was the CFO for a software company and GM for a digital equipment distributor. It was also where he met his Ukrainian born wife Natasha. The Silicon Valley and his own interaction on the internet gave him the inspiration for his first novel. “My first friends in California were people who I originally met on the net,” he says. “I found the internet to be a great way to interact and to explore the world around me. I use it for shopping, for dinner reservations, for map directions, for job searches, for music, and for keeping in touch with friends and family. I also saw the inherent potential for good and evil that plays out every day in the cyber-world, and it was that ambiguity that I decided to write about. What if someone used the internet to stalk a victim?”
Karen immediately went to work, retrieving her husband’s chat files. She spent every moment of her free time reading and making notes and time lines, hoping to understand what was happening with her husband. With all the chat friends and all the chat sessions, he certainly had ample time and opportunity to have an affair.
She couldn’t believe how aggressively his cyber friends had been pursuing him. Almost all of them, even the men, had expressed an unequivocal desire to have sex with her husband. Karen certainly understood why, as Mike was one of those persons who everyone was drawn to, but she was shocked at how graphic some of the chats had been. He had engaged in frank chat sessions on every imaginable sexual topic, including sado-masochism, role playing, bestiality, prostitution, exhibitionism, fetishes, bisexuality, homosexuality, orgies, and even masturbation. Karen knew her husband was an incredibly sexual person like herself, and she knew he was one of the most uninhibited men she had ever encountered, but she was surprised at how at ease he was in every chat session, no matter what the subject.
The one comforting thing about all the files she had managed to read in the past week was that there was not one single indication that he had ever met any of them. Sure, he had been asked repeatedly, again and again, to meet these cyber friends for affairs or rendezvous. But in each instance he had refused them in his chat sessions. She actually had been proud of him when he told each and every one of them that he was “happily married to the most beautiful and special babe in the whole world.”
So Karen continued to read. If nothing else, it gave her insight into her husband’s fantasies and imagination. He was, as she already knew, incredibly witty and charming, even in the cyber world, but she couldn’t help but wonder why her husband spent so much time cultivating so many cyber friends. And it frustrated her, not knowing for sure if he had pierced the cyber barrier and met these complicated characters in the flesh. If indeed the cyber world had become reality, then she knew her marriage was in jeopardy.
