He paints an intimate portrait of life in this odd milieu, related at first by Mayor Jahns as she experiences it on a trip “down deep”. Author Hugh Howey takes his time, like a story told by your elderly aunt, if your aunt was Edith Bunker. It becomes obvious early that something ugly is going on beneath the peaceful surface of life buried deep in the Earth. The condemned person then cleans the camera lenses that show the outside on huge screens to the people inside, who can see that they’re safer inside because no cleaner lives longer than a few minutes, and even the ones who swear they won’t clean always do. To clean is to be sent outside in the poisonous air wearing a suit. This is a verb that quickly becomes ominous to the reader. To speak of outside or, even worse, to express any interest in it is to invite a sentence of cleaning. They know that people used to live on the surface but no one talks about it because that is an offense against the pact. Thousands of people have worked and lived for generations in the concrete bunker that protects them from the poisonous outside world. Okay, that was a bad joke, because the silo is a huge underground structure that is one hundred and fifty floors of completely self-sustaining biosphere with no elevator, only a single large spiral stairway occupying the middle. In the first book we are introduced to Silo 18, one of fifty self-sustaining silos (and they all think they’re the only one) built to protect the human race until the terrorist’s killer nanobots have run their course on the outside world, and we begin learning the ups and downs of that society.

Wool begins near the end of the story, which isn’t obvious until much, much later, and it takes a while to work your way through all three books. After reading the first book of this series I was somewhat curious how the story continues, just enough to buy the next two.

Wool book series