Undercity

In an uncannily prescient novel eerily relevant to our contemporary political moment, Undercity unfolds across 16 interconnected vignettes, as author Monte Schulz charts the lives of two dozen characters desperately trying to survive and retain their humanity in a civil order that has tumbled into totalitarianism. Once there was a republic of boundless wonder and achievement whose bright horizon had gone dark, soiled by a populace it imagined as undisciplined, unhealthy, feebleminded, and whose very existence stained and subverted a great society. A solution appeared in the furious logic of Biological Dominion that named the ineffectual and weak, the criminally deformed and unwell, as the root cause of this decline. Now, imagine laws conceived in the high halls of government to rid this society of millions deemed infected by a curious disease supposedly responsible for that poverty of health and morality. Next, imagine those millions considered to be unfit and unworthy for daily life loaded onto freight trains and ushered away to perish in distant woods and fields. Imagine more thousands chased into the vast underground of labyrinthine caves and dark catacombs beneath vibrant city streets and lovely city parks to wither away and die. Undercity collects the voices of brave survivors, of those who’ve refused to submit to the indignities of eugenical persecution, the horror of gas chambers, and relentless warfare in rural provinces. Some of these stories demonstrate the moral disaster of eugenics, while others tell of courage and love and that indomitable magic of the human spirit that refuses to be silenced in the face of unspeakable crimes. Perhaps Undercity is a warning to us, as well, that what we might think is unimaginable needs only apathy and inattention to arise.