“My life is too tight, he wanted to say. My skin is too tight. The walls are too tight.”

Wool is one of the big books that’s been sitting on my bookshelf that I put on my list of goals to finish this year. It’s definitely a long book, and probably a lot longer than it needs to be. I felt that the pacing of the story was a little off but realized about halfway through that it originally had been released in sections, which might explain why.

It’s the story of a future civilization that has survived some sort of Apocalypse by living underground in silos. About every generation there some sort of uprising that wipes out all of the previous history. Of course, people can’t go on living this way, so the protagonists begin to discover the secrets of the silo, and come up against the evil IT man that runs the place.

I thought the details of the life in the silo were fascinating, but the writing wasn’t very good. The characters are broadly drawn, and since he tends to kill off a main character every section or so, it’s hard to have any sort of flow. Again, this may have been because of the way the book was originally released. However, I did find the overall concept pretty fascinating, and the ending was one hell of a cliffhanger, so I’m going to have to hunt down a copy of the sequel for sure. Hoping that since the next book was written as one whole book that the story may benefit.