The Bunker Diary

Kevin Brooks is always an edgy writer, close to violence and despair in his fiction while rarely offering any clear way towards better outcomes. And in this latest story he has  excelled himself; if there was a prize for the most nihilistic novel of the year, this would surely be a strong contender. Like John Fowles’s chilling and in some way prescient The Collector,  the main plot concerns a demented villain, never met over the entire novel, who kidnaps various people this time for no apparent reason and then keeps them imprisoned in an underground bunker. The story is told by 18-year-old Linus, the first captive. He is a decent person who tries to make the best of things as he is joined by an increasingly dysfunctional group of other adults and one child. It is a gripping story, well told and hard to forget. But it is also oh so depressing, with Linus’s attempts at self-analysis becoming less and less coherent as his situation worsens. At the finish however, much as one is impressed by Brooks’s skill and powers of invention, two questions still remain: why and so what?