A review by couldbestephen
The Underground by Ty Pape

1.0

It’s incredibly transparent when an unskilled writer doesn’t have anyone in their life to say, “Hey, let’s sit on this idea a little longer and run it through a few more revisions before getting it indie published, mkay?” When eager, unchecked authors push for publication, we end up with poorly written, underdeveloped novels like The Underground, by debut author Ty Pape. 

If you stumble across this book in person while in a Lincoln Nebraska Barnes & Noble, you’d have to look it up online to read the blub, seeing as the back cover tells you nothing. The Underground is a post-apocalyptic, dystopian, subterranean novel about a group of people forced underground after some sort of nuclear war. Josh, our main character, has spent 10 years in this Colony (known as The Underground), working in the gardens and dreaming of life on the surface. As things (predictably) start to fall apart, Josh must search for a way back to life as they knew it.

The lack of care in the world building of The Underground frustrated me the most. Pape’s writing for the government and culture of The Underground is bland and uninspired. His premise could be interesting, but it’s clear he doesn’t understand the post-apocalyptic, subterranean genre enough to be able to tell a convincing story through it. The heteronormative, gender-segregated, conservative Christian-like government of The Underground is filled with cliche, mustache twirling villains. There are so many issues with the infrastructure of The Underground I could write a whole essay on them. As the book progresses and we leave The Underground, things do not improve. They actually get worse.

Papes’ writing style is incredibly amateur; I felt like I was reading bad City of Ember fanfiction on Wattpad. According to Barnes & Noble and Reedsy Discovery, an editor named Oren Eades helped with this novel, but I question his involvement with this piece. From over-written sentences to terrible dialogue, Pape beats you over the head with his ham-handed info-dumps, preferring to poorly “tell” everything instead of “showing” the reader. There is a fair amount of perspective hopping that detracts from the reading experience. The pacing of the book is abysmal. The choice to write using third person, present tense, omniscient narration was bold (and poorly thought out). 

While this isn’t billed as Christian fiction, Pape’s religious beliefs are peppered throughout with the subtlety and grace of a bomb. Even the bad purple prose he tried to employ can’t hide the blatant Biblical verses and references he shoves in. His messages about mental and emotional wounds are laughably shallow and exactly what you’d expect from someone of Pape’s background and writing caliber. There are times the plot completely stops so Pape can cram a mini-sermon in. Near the middle of the book, a random Note to the Reader appears with a sermon that could have been written by a brand new youth pastor. 

Pape urges his readers to “compare and contrast [their] life throughout this novel” in the misnamed “Prologue” of The Underground, clearly seeing his book as some deep, philosophical exploration of fear, self-love, and the human condition. His book is as deep as a leaking kiddy pool. I would not recommend this novel. If you want good books about people living under the earth during a time of upheaval, I’d recommend The City of Ember series by Jeanne DuPrau or The Silo series by Hugh Howey.