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Reviewed by Jamie Michele for Readers' Favorite
In Dark Place by Christopher Kell, when Ros is taken in the night after her government rating as a compliant citizen suddenly collapses, her friends, Femke and Domhnal, follow through on a dangerous plan to discover where the dispossessed are sent. They deliberately trigger their own removal and wait in a remote transit camp governed by drones and stripped of modern technology. Forced into a cycle of relocation and subsistence living, they confront a world hidden from the population that remains behind. Determined to expose the truth, they attempt to use covert neural devices to transmit their location beyond the camp’s surveillance. As rumours spread of unrest in the outside world and new arrivals bring fragments of alarming news, the three friends begin to understand that the Dark Place may hold answers far larger than their original mission.
Christopher Kell’s Dark Place is a supremely unique and well-written story, with the title referencing a hidden region of Earth where citizens with low “Citizen Scores” are secretly transported. In the Light Place, society appears orderly and prosperous under constant surveillance. The complete world-building of the Dark Place, in particular, is brilliant: a vast former Greenland territory stripped of ice and repurposed as a controlled wilderness where the dispossessed must live as hunter-gatherers. Ros is a worthy protagonist, adaptable enough while stranded during a forced relocation to survive alone, then working within camp routines. Femke is a close second and the philosophical center, questioning why the Authority sustains the camps at all. The scenes border on cinematic, and immerse us in situations where drones form circling rings above, and engines hum under a bruised Arctic sky. Readers who enjoy intelligent speculative fiction rooted in surveillance states and climate engineering will adore Dark Place. Very highly recommended.
