Dark bleatings, my anticipating tribe! It’s release day for Stephanie Ellis’s brand new novel, The Barricade, and I can finally post this review! Yippee!
When the world threatened to end, a select few went into an underground complex and left those above to survive any way they could. Scientist Faith Hamilton and her grown daughter Josie are two of the abandoned. A Barricade around the entrance to the bunker ensures those below would never be allowed out.
Twenty years later they start hearing strange voices, seeing shadows within. Those below start to appear in the inner circle of the Barricade asking to be let out. Those above still refuse. Faith and her friends discover it hasn’t isolated them as they thought, that in fact there has been communication and manipulation by those underground all this time.
The end is nigh, and the more privileged flee to an underground bunker, quite readily abandoning everyone else, wholeheartedly expecting them to die. But they didn’t. The end came and went, humanity persisted, and now those in the bunker are screwed because the lesser folk who couldn’t go with them, out of what seems to be sheer spite, have constructed a barricade that stops the bunker people from surfacing. What. A. Premise.
This setup immediately aligned me with the survivors on the surface, because I assumed they must be the goodies, on account of the others selfishly abandoning them. My automatic assumption was that the people in the bunker are villains (I mean, they did behave a bit villainy), and that the survivors up top were the heroes. However, the people up top aren’t exactly… er… not also being villainous.
This novel is a little political in its dystopian setting, and in its mechanics, and in its world-building, and in its characters. It is way more complex and interesting than people below are bad, and people up top are good. One of the first things we learn is that up top, there is a mixed government, but the men start holding secret meetings without including the female members. It gave me immediate early days of The Handmaid’s Tale fear.
I found this story to be layered and intriguing and Ellis explores everything with so much empathy and honesty. There’s an exciting ‘Us Vs. Them’ narrative, but it’s one that makes you question whether that should even be the case, despite how they all got to where they currently are.
I think the main thing that I really loved about it is that I totally, and incorrectly, thought I knew exactly what kind of story I was reading – for quite some time. It was so comprehensively set up and framed that I was sitting there all smug, predicting the story beats.
Oh, but how wrong I was.
So, to summarise, The Barricade is not only an insanely interesting exploration of the transient nature of human morality and relationships, but it’s also turned out to be one of the most significant stories I’ve read this year because it (and the following conversation with its author) yanked me back from a particular precipice (which I won’t go into here, because once I get on a tangent… but I’d be happy to talk further elsewhere, for anyone interested!).
I’d recommend The Barricade to fans of dystopian stories, people with an interest in culture and relationships, and also to those who enjoy a little sci-fi with their horror…
If you’d like to check out the book or author, I’ve popped some links below for you:
Happy Goat Horror 
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