Overview

The Dark Side of the Internet comes in the form of a teacher review website that allows anyone at all, even non-students, to post reviews of teachers, anonymously without consequence to the reviewer, thus unleashing the nastiest sides of the human species - a website where blackmail, extortion, defamation, plain old lying for the sake of lying, and Machiavellian deviltry rise and reign. For a loophole in Title 4 7, Section 203 of the U.S. Legal Code, never intended by Congress, allows students (and teachers as well) to take advantage of the new technology to try to destroy others. Daniel Curzon is indeed an important, influential, enlightening, and entertaining author. - Robert Patrick, author of Kennedy's Children (Winner of the National New Play Contest for Godot Arrives)

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Prolific playwright, novelist and gay activist Daniel Curzon now applies his caustic wit and elegant prose style to knee-jerk political correctness on campus and grade-grubbing, semi-literate students making vicious online judgments of instructors, often without ever showing up in the classroom. Curzon taught two decades in the English department at City College of San Francisco. In a disclaimer, he insists that the corrupt animal farm where his beleaguered hero Professor Nathanael Tack teaches ( Shite College in the city of Santa Francesca ) bears no resemblance to CCSF. But the details of Curzon's indictment are delicious nonetheless: wracked by neo-puritan guilt, Tack's benighted colleagues-Charlotte Wiggley, Haywood Wire, Dean Calvin Visigoth, etc.-stumble around campus (where we find the comically named Helen C. Keller Visual Arts Building and the Lowe-Rankin Dining Room) petrified that the students they're supposed to be enlightening will rate them insufficiently malleable or meek. Curzon has a firm grasp of the absurd and an eye for telling detail that recalls Evelyn Waugh or Joseph Heller. Tack must endure the boy from Bahrain who wants to skip weeks of classes to oversee the honor killing of his sister; the nasty illiterate who thinks his educashun is imperiled by bigotry against Dutch-Americans, and a band of militant bicyclists who beat motorists with bicycle chains. At the heart of Curzon's funny, often angry, narrative are the perpetrators of a bogus campus website that excoriates and libels teachers they hate. One of the tamer posts: . . . she carrie's a big chop on her shoulder. Tack is, of course, a central target of the witless cyberbullies. He is also gay, so he must withstand slurs and work tricky relationships with his unstable lover and his teenage son. At almost 500 pages, Cyberbully runs long, and Curzon's deep sense of grievance can be exhausting. But he's an eloquent social satirist, and this hilarious portrait of one man's battle against ignorance and folly is relentlessly entertaining. - Blue In Review

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