This book caught my eye at a Border's a few weeks back so I picked it up. Since Harry Potter came along, I've noticed this weird hybrid genre in fantastic fiction, it's skewed towards the teen and young adult reader however it's pretty approachable from an adult standpoint. Tunnels would fall under this new category.
The book takes place in England and deals with a teen boy's relationship with family and friend but also his passion for digging long tunnels into, buried for decades, underground ruins. I love stuff like this. A&E's series on Underground Cities is one of my favorite shows and this book plays into.
The boy and his fellow diggers ultimately unearth a true mystery dealing with an entire civilization that's chosen to remain deep under earth. The society closed itself off during the Victorian period so you have an absolutely eerie combination of ghostly illuminated Victorian mole men and a tightly wrapped coming of age story. I've never read anything quite like this. Authors Gordon and Williams paint a very dark picture of the boy's home life and what lies several thousand feet under his town.
The tunnels go even deeper with more imagined horrors and societies living beneath the first discovered settlement. It would take a very mature teen to fathom some of the situations presented in this book, either that or I'm just very old and kids are much more mature nowadays.
This book, the beginning of a series, is fantastic and I heartily recommend it. I pretended to buy it for my 14 year old but she hasn't even seen it yet. I'll let her read it ... but I want it back.
(Originally released in the UK as The Highfield Mole)
