Beneath by Roland Smith (review)

Pat O’Toole has always adored his older brother, Coop, the scourge of their overachieving parents. Coop, with technophobe tendencies, a diet limited to tuna sandwiches, and an obsession with everything that lies below the surface, takes off at age eighteen and finally makes contact with Pat months later, sending him a small voice recorder and a post box address in New York City through which they can exchange messages. It works for a while, but when the messages abruptly stop, Pat lies to his parents and heads to the city to ferret out Coop. Spotting a man taking mail from Coop’s post office box, Pat gets his first solid lead; it takes him to an underground community of “houseless” persons with whom Coop had recent contact. He didn’t stay long, however, drawn even deeper underground toward a settlement of people of fearsome and deadly repute. Pat’s assisted by Kate, a girl from The Deep who claims to know Coop, and who sees in the two brothers her ticket out of the dystopian community in which she has been raised by her grandfather—a radical Weatherman from the Sixties with plans to wreak anarchy on the surface dwellers. Smith sketches out a couple of promising plotlines but never lingers long enough to develop them satisfactorily, leaving readers wishing they could spend more time investigating the living arrangements of the underground community, and needing more specifics about the threat from (as well as background information about) the holdout Weathermen. An ambiguous conclusion leaves room for a sequel, but the peril lurking just under the city may be the most rewarding ending for thriller fans.