WHERE GODS WHISPER

In Colapietro’s novel, a woman who’s been imprisoned since she was abducted as a young girl learns about the destructive political and technological forces that have laid waste to America.

When the shadowy Chaplain Davis visits abductee Mencken Barnes in the Kestral, where she and many others are jailed, he asks a question: “What is your desire in life?” Mencken, in dirty scrubs and with only powder for food, is resolute: “Freedom.” Vague memories of her parents, Olivia and Ashwyn Barnes, drive her grim instinct for survival, as does a mantra she learned from her mother: “Scientia potentia est,” or “Knowledge is power.” She finds a mysterious text, titled Where Gods Whisper, which details political tortures and disappearances. In this book, author Frederick R. Ewing collates the “Chambers documents,” which trace Henry Chambers’ role as a “Tolson Homebot specialist at a Devol Technologies workshop in Youngstown.” Among other things, she reads that Tolson Homebots are present in more than 70% of American homes while perusing a series of newspaper clippings and transcripts of conversations between U.S. President Marcel Douglas and Devol Technologies founder and CEO James McHenry from February 2051. The robots, which are powered by artificial intelligence and “free of sin or waste,” are constructed by workers in poor conditions. A whistle-blowing dissident organization, Libertas, strives to stop production and publicize the dangers of these devices. When Mencken finally escapes to search for her parents, a desolate landscape awaits her, where she sees pamphlets describing “where to go in the event of a nuclear strike” and wonders, “Was she the last person alive?” To survive, she must untangle all that she has read and find the disturbing truth.

Colapietro cleverly aligns the reader with Mencken; both must piece together what’s happened to the nation by using the titular text-within-a-text. The story is well plotted, balancing the protagonist’s escape from the Kestral with the intriguing information found in the Chambers documents. The account of the knotty alliance between a tech company and the government acts as a dark, modern parable on the real-life consequences and ethics of AI usage. Mencken meets the sympathetic Oslo Arguello, who teaches her how to survive; he also offers much-needed hope and possibility amid the gloom, with a “booming laugh that whittled into a wheeze.” Her aphorism, “scientia potential est,” is tested when she eventually reunites with her father. Mencken’s initial resistance to him is, perhaps, too readily suppressed by her deep desire to be part of a family. However, her characterization deepens as she remembers her desire for freedom, which she eventually feels is “being taken from her again.” In the book’s second half, the narrative briskly details U.S. Sen. Arthur Timms’ role in history and his rise to power, driven by a desire to break “the systems that broke his mother”; the two halves feel slightly disjointed, although the Barnes family’s involvement in the overarching drama binds the narrative together. Ridley’s eerie and colorful pen-and-ink drawings lend increasingly dark visual layers to the plot.

A haunting dystopian thriller that’s underpinned by a compelling political mystery.