Reviewed by Jamie Michele for Readers' Favorite
In J.M. Erickson’s Deadly Going Dark, ten-year-old David Strong lives in the Great Third Republic, a future America rebuilt after environmental collapse into sealed habitats divided by caste. Born into the ruling patrician class, David is expected to enter military school and uphold the social order served by his powerful father. An attack leaves David hospitalized, where an experimental treatment changes the way he experiences fear and alters how he responds to violence. Training with the Plebeian Auxiliary Corps gives him skills far beyond those expected of a boy his age, while friendships outside the patrician world expose a life his family considers beneath him. As anger toward his home life hardens, David begins to see the forbidden Dark Zone as a place where he might finally determine what happens to him next.
J.M. Erickson’s Deadly Going Dark is a really well-executed science-fiction dystopian novel. David is a protagonist we want to root for as independence tests the military instincts that have shaped him since childhood. The Republic’s caste system is tangible through its people, like Isabelle Roswell, a patrician teenager whose crashed transport draws outsiders toward the Dark Zone, then gives David’s guarded loyalties an intimate edge through Maggie, his sister, urging him to face Becky and Tom, the childhood friends he has kept at a distance for years. The extraordinary telling of David’s life beyond Earth broadens the book beautifully. His work alongside soldiers drawn from different social classes makes Fort Deadly instantly believable. Erickson also handles political issues sharply, through visual scenes like those same soldiers emerging through the Martian darkness beneath red and green field lights. Readers who enjoy intelligent dystopian fiction with a fiercely humane protagonist will adore this.
