This is a pretty good book. It’s got a lot of interesting twists, and the post-apocalyptic world is both terrifying and fascinating. Also, it’s very well written. So why am I DNFing it?
Mostly because I don’t have the stomach for this kind of story right now. It’s very depressing. The post-apocalyptic world of the silo is not the kind of place I’d ever want to visit, much less live in. None of the characters really strike me as all that heroic, or as people that I can look up to and admire. I recognize that not all good stories need to have these things, but that’s what I’m looking for right now. It was different before the pandemic, but now that we’re living in an apocalypse of our own, I’m going to give this story a pass.
I suspect that the post-apocalyptic genre is going to change a lot over the next few years. History goes through cycles of crisis and rejuvenation, and the kinds of stories that speak to people before a crisis are very different than the ones that speak to people after it. This is very clearly one of those stories written during the pre-crisis era: dark and foreboding, trying to shake people and wake them up to how horrible things can be. But now that we are living through a crisis era, I think our culture is going to swing much more toward the opposite kind of story: one where good, kind, and just people fight back against the darkness, both within and without, and work together to build the new world.
Perhaps that’s actually what happens in this book. I don’t know. I read the first section, which is actually the self-published short story that kicked the whole thing off, but after that the book just seemed to wallow in the same claustrophobic despair that drove much of the short story, so I gave up. Perhaps I’ll come back to finish it some other time, but not right now.