Unlike some novels I have been reading with a serious effort like I was plowing through a field devastated by drought, The Wool Trilogy by Hugh Howey is exactly the opposite. A perfectly balanced deep fall through a silo, which forces the reader to keep falling and falling, unable to stop himself and put the the books down until he hits the end.
Science fiction? Maybe. But only for the reason of being set in a Dystopian future.
The scariest thing was looking at a daringly realistic portrait of our society today. What happened to humanity?!? Plausibly unintentionally (or maybe intentionally after all), upsetting parallels of the real world are screaming into our faces like a wake-up call. If we do not do something to light up the flames of humanity and share with our loved ones and the stranger on the street, we will all end up in our present-day versions of silos eventually to be suffocated and poisoned, reduced to mere things, numbers.
Howey gave us a masterpiece. But he has also shown us the safe path to our future. This is the gift we should cherish, even if we chose not to believe that silos could actually happen.
BJ