Wool, by Hugh Howey

To be honest, reading Wool in hardback feels a bit like starting to watch Lost or a similar TV series well after everyone was done with it. Because it was published in instalments - self-contained ones at that, so each one felt like a novella of its own - a lot of the buzz around the plotting has died down. You can tell a lot about the story, its setting and general ideas, just from the look of the cover and the blurb.

With the whole narrative presented together Howey's influences are a lot easier to identify. The most striking for me was Forster's short story 'The Machine Stops', and there's elements of classic 'thinking resistance' stuff like 1984 or even Logan's Run. The underground setting has also brought a lot of comparisons in publishing media to City of Ember, but for me the claustrophobic but everyday setting reminded me more of Day of the Dead.

With this many comparisons readily available it would be easy to mark Howey's setting as unoriginal and I do think that reading it all in sequence robs it of some of the freshness that a sequential release allows. However there's a very real positive to be found in reading it all in one go, and it's one that plays well to the novel's strengths: Wool is a character-driven work of post apocalyptica. Reading it all in unbroken sequence allows you to really get to know the people you follow about.

It's difficult to expand on this without giving away much of the plot, but I'll say this: you care about the people that you're reading about at the time, even if that person isn't necessarily the protagonist. Their choices and feelings have consequence, and that means the story rattles along and Howey's love of cliffhangers never feels gratuitous. It doesn't matter that the setting isn't particularly novel, the character's are themselves unique, and so the whole affair seems original and bright.

The writing is direct, clean and occasionally quite breezy. It reminded me of specific parts of Stephen King (those paragraphs where people are actually doing something, without rambling on or changing font mid-sentence), and that's no bad way to tell a story. There are maybe three of four passages where it gets a little purple but if anything I think that's the tone contrasting with the setting and I'm prepared to cut Howey some slack.

It's also a bit uneven in terms of character weight (and again this is hard to discuss without spoilers). The sooner people are introduced the more you care, and with such a strong opening sequence it would be hard for the later characters to to burrow in so successfully, but by this point the plot has begun to pull you along anyway, so it's a minor failing.

All-in-all Wool is a competent, well-thought out work of post-apocalyptic fiction. It doesn't subvert many expectations (although it's got a few wicked bait-n-switches), and fans of the genre will be on familiar ground, but it's a story about well written characters, and such tales will always be worth reading. And finally (I suspect this is directly related to it's previous digital releases), it's only £9.99 for a very nice looking hardback, which is not to be sniffed at, frankly. Recommended.