Book Review: "Wool" by Hugh Howey

Wool (2012)
Hugh Howey (1975)

514 pages

Whatever you do, don’t read Hugh Howey’s novel Wool --- unless you are prepared to drop everything else you are doing and stiff-arm any interruptions. Once you have entered into his dystopian view of earth’s future, you won’t want to set the book down until you finish.

The story is set in a giant, underground city that its residents refer to as the “silo”. Though sealed off from the toxic atmosphere and barren landscape on the surface, the people lead seemingly normal lives, raising families and working at the jobs needed to maintain the silo and its population. With only a hazy understanding that anyone had ever lived on the surface above, they have largely adapted to the rigid and structured roles that living in such a confined space requires.

The one taboo, the most serious law that can be violated, is to speak of the world the silo or express a desire to go ‘outside’. To even show an interest in going outside the silo condemns one to being exiled to the surface, and so nearly immediate death. The novel takes its name from a part of the sentence the condemned face: to clear off the silo’s outside cameras and sensors with wool and cleaning solution in the time before they succumb to the deadly conditions on the surface.

 These facts come out in the first few pages of the novel; to say more would rob a reader of the joy of discovering the details for themselves. Howey’s writes in a style that heightens the tension of the story, with relatively short chapters alternating between different characters and places in the silo. I found myself pulled forward through the story, reading faster and faster, so that at times I had to consciously slow myself down. And he avoids settling into a predictable narrative; as the novel develops it becomes impossible to predict which characters will survive the events of the story and which will not. This fits neatly with his answer in a short addendum to the book, ‘A Conversation with Hugh Howey,’ to the question “Is this really the end?”: “There’s always another story to tell. Just maybe not the one readers expect.”

What can safely be said without revealing too much is that the novel’s themes are universal: in any society there will be revolutionaries who want to know more and do more than what the rules allow, and reactionaries who will stop at nothing to preserve the status quo. Between these two groups, the rest of the population will split into pieces, some following the one side or the other, while most simply keep their heads down to avoid trouble. Timeless themes, but ones around which Howey builds a compelling view of a dystopian future world that feels all too possible.

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Other reviews / information:
The books were originally published as e-books, before being brought together into this print edition.

Howey has written three stories that serve as a prequel to Wool, called Shift.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy reading your feedback.

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