DARLAH (Original title: DARLAH) is a sci-fi / horror novel by the Norwegian author Johan Harstad, published in 2008. The plot starts in 2012, when NASA decides to launch another mission to the moon and as a mean of gaining public interest (and funding) and announces a lottery in which three teenagers will be allowed to go on the mission along with the astronauts. The real purpose for the expedition is to examine a mystical phenomenon, recently rediscovered; it apparently was the real reason that NASA stopped sending people to the moon in the seventies. DARLAH is the name of the lunar base they are staying in, a until recently secret installation dating back to 1976. Nasa holds a contest for kids between 13 and 18. The winners are a girl from Norway who plays in a band, a boy from France who just lost his girlfriend, and a girl from Japan who is bullied at school.
At the moon, they all discovers that something terrible will happen. Something that can mean the end of humanity.
The novel is a tribute to and draws heavily from several science-fiction and horror novels and films from the 1970s and the 1980as, such as Alien, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Solaris and 2001: A Space Odyssey. As in his 2007 novel, Hässelby, DARLAH also draws inspiration from David Lynch's tv-series Twin Peaks.
Harstad won the Norwegian Brage Award for DARLAH. The novel is currently being translated to English, French, Dutch, Faroese, German, Korean and Swedish.