GIRL WITH THE SILVER HAIR

In Seupel’s YA SF novel, a teenager with powerful psychic abilities undergoes training as a fighter against “terrorists” in a post-nuclear-holocaust world.

The story opens some time past the 2040s in an underground “pod” bunker, where 16-year-old Eten has formidable psychic powers and trademark silver hair. Her younger siblings share similar genetic traits, though not so strongly developed. Eten can teleport herself or other objects, divine other peoples’ thoughts to some extent, and, most importantly, fight and kill via telekinesis. The children are told by their military-officer parents they are a post-nuclear-apocalypse evolution of mankind, crucial to the survival of a subterranean, locked-down United States beset by savage enemies on Earth’s radiation-scarred surface. Eten is directed to use her deadly brainwaves on an accused “terrorist” leader, but she begins to doubt the tales being fed to her. It transpires that the kids are part of “Project Samson,” an initiative by the American military and government to grow DNA-modified test-tube embryos into weaponized, ESP-augmented assassins. The Pentagon powers behind Project Samson have learned that maintaining control over these super-beings grows difficult over time—especially when the subjects reach puberty—and uncooperative members of the group have been summarily killed. How long can Eten hide her wrathful discontent and rely on the dubious protection offered by a sympathetic guard, or her faux “mom” and “dad”? The premise of youngsters being cultivated by Black Ops agencies as mutant secret weapons is not an original one (there are similar tales by Dean R. Koontz, Stephen King, and John Farris), but Seupel’s take proceeds in an effective, straight-ahead fashion as Eten, a stranger to concepts such as money or menstruation, becomes a fugitive in the “real world”—a very familiar one in the YA-dystopian genre in which an unjust society is threatened by rising sea levels and violently authoritarian adults. (Trying to ingratiate herself with the fascistic power structure, Eten proclaims, “More than anything in the world, I want to defend our country and make America great again.”) With such strong forward momentum, the material will not require psychic pushes to compel readers to barrel through in one sitting.

A bracing headlong rush of SF action and angst.