Review: The seedy underbelly of the silo exposed!
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 09 12, 2013
Someone is getting prostitutes, also known as "Silo Sluts", hooked on drugs and then killing them.  Lieutenant McDonald is the sheriff tasked with hunting him down, looking for a serial killer in a silo. The killer himself is shrouded in mystery, but his motives are made clear: power, control, egomania.The post-apocalyptic world of the silos is depressing enough. Add to that bleak atmosphere a silo that reeks of despair and features rampant class warfare between the "Uppers" and the "Downers". Mix this all together and you have a squalid cesspool filled with a population ruled by those with power crushing the powerless under their boot.Now, to this mix, you add a character who's lost all he's ever loved in the world.  He shuffles through life, sleepwalks through his job, as a shadow of his former self. On some level, he recognizes he is ineffectual at it but goes to work anyway. We learn why he 's this way, living in an alcohol-fueled self-medicated haze. We discover how with his position, given to him through an opportunity, he can make a difference. But he's too depressed to do so and would rather succumb to the emotional numbness that encompasses his daily life.Until he starts to emerge from the darkness shrouding his soul, discovering a glimpse of happiness and a yearning for something more than his daily life provides him. In the process, he sets out for the first time in a long time to overcome his malaise and embrace his purpose. This reawakening leads to a hunger for something more and he sets out to find the killer, filled with resolve and a desire for justice.With flashbacks to help understand his motivations and an encounter with someone from his past, we come to care for McDonald and root for him to succeed. And we when we reach the final showdown, we see how much his life experiences to date affect McDonald's judgment and the actions he takes based on it. Then the author throws in one final twist to make you wonder if McDonald's battle for justice was worth it when compared to the larger war against the darkness of the silo.A brooding style is being skillfully utilized here. Using sparse description and spare prose to set the mood, he gives you just enough words to picture the story and to propel the plot. You won't find any lengthy discourses of exposition here, all of the words are in service to the story without slowing it down. There are also some scenes that could be illustrated through prose but instead the author provokes your imagination to do the work and fill in the rest of the details. Like a horror movie that implies gore and violence off-screen versus showing it in all of its explicit, gruesome detail, your imagination illustrates something far worse than could ever be described on a page. When used to its full effect, it strengthens the story with an additional power and embellishes the dark mood. Finally, through a subtle writing style, shows how McDonald depersonalizes his surroundings with some characters receiving a name and others only recognized through their job description. This enhances the mood further and helps the reader retain a tight focus on McDonald and his struggles.This was an engrossing tale that makes me look forward to seeing what other creative stories the author has to tell.