Book Review | Underground by S. L. Grey

The Sanctum is a luxurious, self-sustaining survival condominium situated underground in rural Maine. It's a plush bolt-hole for the rich and paranoid—a place where they can wait out the apocalypse in style. When a devastating super-flu virus hits the States, several families race to reach it. All have their own motivations for entering The Sanctum. All are hiding secrets.

But when the door lock and a death occurs, they realise the greatest threat to their survival may not be above the ground—it may already be inside...

***

In this day and age, grave danger is everywhere. Quite aside from the exponential toll of terrorism, there's environmental catastrophe to consider, and so many potential vectors of deadly infection that just counting them could kill you—never mind the nukes pointed at every major population centre on the planet.

That the world will end—and sooner rather than later, some say—is as good as a given. Something's got to give, and when it does, you and your loved ones will want somewhere safe to stay. Somewhere completely sealed against sickness; somewhere with such state-of-the-art security that not even a mouse could get into your house; somewhere so darned deep underground that surviving the bombs that are sure to start dropping is guaranteed to be a breeze.

The Sanctum is that somewhere.

A stylish, self-sustaining survival condo built hundreds of metres below the bedrock of the great state of Maine, The Sanctum comes complete with a swimming pool, gym facilities, its own medical suite, an elevator, high bandwidth wi-fi, biometric locks, motion sensors and a Grow Your Own garden. In short, it's sure to ensure "pure peace of mind" (p.10) even as the world beyond its barbed-wire bounds goes to hell in a handbasket.

Promises, unfortunately, are only as strong as the person who makes them, and Greg, the mind behind The Sanctum, may have cut a couple of corners in the course of its construction. Precious few of the mod cons he pitched to the five families who bought into the prospective project are fully functional, and an array of them aren't even there: the elevator is an empty shaft, for example, and the medical suite is a metal bed with a nearby supply of band-aids.

But when the apocalypse appears, better, by all accounts, to take some semblance of shelter than none.

Least... you'd think that, wouldn't you?