The Compound by S.A. Bodeen

The Compound by S.A. Bodeen
Series: The Compound, #1
Source: Bought
Publisher: Macmillan
Publication Date: April 29, 2008

Eli and his family have lived in the underground Compound for six years. The world they knew is gone, and they've become accustomed to their new life. Accustomed, but not happy.

For Eli, no amount of luxury can stifle the dull routine of living in the same place, with only his two sisters, his father and mother, doing the same thing day after day after day.

As problems with their carefully planned existence threaten to destroy their sanctuary—and their sanity—Eli can't help but wonder if he'd rather take his chances outside.

Eli's father built the Compound to keep them safe. But are they safe—or sorry?

First off, I only picked this up because of the freaking amazingly intriguing description. It was a serious steal. But when I started reading it, well, I realized...the description isn't the best part of the book. *high-five-score* It was well written and interesting-- and above all, really weird.

Sometimes this is a good thing. But other times? Well...ummm. It was almost too weird. Take this: how do you feel about living in an underground bomb shelter for 15 years? Me, well, underground? No. This is going to work out, and on top of that, there's too many flaws to the plan. What if, say, your underground shelter blocks you down there? All manner of things could fall on the exit, trapping you in a whole in the ground forever. It has the same problems as a storm shelter.

Which have you ever been in one of those? Even for a short time, maybe even to just clean it out...it's not pleasant in any manner of the word. I may be a bit claustrophobic.

Moving onto the next problem, which we run into in this book-- food shortage. They start to run out of food early on. Just a simple shortage of flour and it all goes downhill. Their livestock dies underground. So six years in, their flour has gone bad, their livestock has died and on top of that they don't even know for sure that there was a nuclear blast. Does this remind anyone else of that movie...what is it called....Blast from the Past? Is that it? I don't know.

But anyway. They have food sources dwindling. They don't know why they're down there...and well, Eli starts to investigate. Thank God, someone who doesn't believe everything that he's fed. So he investigates. And guess what? Things aren't always what they seem. They're at the mercy of a complete and total mad man.

This is where the SPOILERY part comes in, so if you don't want spoilers don't highlight it. Honestly, Eli's dad is completely fruity. Totally off his rocker, needs meds full time, how does this weirdo have kids crazy. Here's my first issue with him: he's power hungry. How is it that all of the random psycho guys in books have power? He has power and he wants more, so he takes his family, minus one son, into an underground bomb shelter and plans to stay for 15 years. He PURPOSEFULLY makes sure that they run out of food, just so he can see how far his family will go to survive. He starts having as many kids as possible, because when the food runs out, he wants his family to eat them. What kind of a sick bastard has kids and calls them "supplements" and wants to see whether or not his family will eat them? AND THEN. Turns out that he left one son in the real world accidentally-- but nothing has happened in the outside world. He just wanted to prove that his family could do it! They had funerals! O.O 

Freaking A! The entire idea just makes me freak the heck out. So much, like seriously. But I can't discount the fact that for this book to freak me out so much, well, it had to be something special. It was well written and gripping, and although I didn't really care all that much about the characters, I still wanted to know what happened to them. So there is that. If you can get past the downright psycho-ness of the story, it's definitely worth a read.