Wool

An unspecified event hundreds of years ago forced humanity underground. To go out on the surface now is a death sentence, reserved only for those who commit the most terrible of crimes: Asking to leave.

This is called being “sent out to clean.” The individual is dressed in a protective suit and given a wool cloth. They are asked to wipe off the sensors that give the Silo’s inhabitants a view of the desolate outside world. It’s a mystery why every cleaner follows through with this before they succumb and die.

Juliette is a mechanic in the bowels of the Silo. She is too busy keeping the power on to worry about the outside world. Then, one day, the mayor of the silo descends all 144 floors of the grand staircase to make Juliette an offer: Replace the last Sheriff who went out to clean.

As a girl from the down-deeps, Juliette has no idea about the politics at play in the floors above. No sooner does she pin on her star then she finds herself embroiled in a high-profile murder case, targeted by department heads who want her gone, and unraveling the mystery of what happened to her predecessor.

This is a fantastic setup for a mystery story that the author, Hugh Howey, clearly has no interest in. Everything is either spelled out right away or is so heavily signposted that you can’t help but immediately connect the dots before the characters do. Then the author dumps all this and takes the story in a totally different direction.

After doing a little digging, I discovered that Wool originally began life as a short story. The author then kept expanding it, first into a series of novellas and then finally into a novel. This makes a lot of sense and explains some of the lumpy story structure.

More problematic are the characters, who all feel paper thin when they aren’t acting like weepy, melodramatic teenagers. There’s never any subtlety. The players pound their chests and wail and moan, their inner dialogue a seething turmoil of pithy emotions.

I think if you took a shot of alcohol every time one of the characters starts crying, you’d be dead or comatose before the final chapter. It’s almost funny, later in the book, when they introduce a new character who is described as a stunted child in a man’s body. He acts just like everyone else.

It doesn’t feel like anyone grows or changes. Most of the players exist simply as a plot function. You know everything about each character in just a few lines because there is nothing else to discover. The villain is so laughably obvious that he might as well appear twirling his moustache and cackling.

This will sound like blasphemy to some, but I actually prefer what the TV adaptation is doing at this point. I feel like the writers there took these bare character sketches and breathed life into them, expanding the plot and embelishing the worldbuilding that mostly sits in the margins here.

As something that inspired some great television, I have to give this book some grudging respect. I wouldn’t say I regret reading it. I didn’t hate it. But Wool reads like a rough draft that the show’s creators wisely edited into a great story. As such, I think I’ll stick with the show for now and give the two follow-up novels a pass.