Under the Empyrian Sky (The Heartland Trilogy Book 1) by Chuck Wendig

When thinking on dystopic fiction, a bleak and barren landscape might be one of the first images the mind conjures. Other images might be of a bleak mindless corporate driven people in featureless cities. One doesn’t think of cornstalks taking over the landscape.Well, unless you are Chuck Wendig.Under the Empyrian Sky is the first installment in Wendig’s Heartland Trilogy and his first novel for a younger audience.

Cael McAvoy is the captain of scavenging crew searching out lost and broken pieces to use on their ship. His crew includes first mate Gwennie and his friends Rigo and Lane. They all live in the town of Boxelder, where the majority of the novel’s action takes place. All the corn grown in Boxelder is not for the citizens of the town; it is a product sent to their Empyrian overlords to be transformed into food product and plastics. The Boxelders subsist on ‘shuck rats,’ rodents which scamper about the great stalks of corn and any other vegetables they might plunder. You see, Corn is the dark force in this world; it has been genetically modified to the point that it is nearly sentient. At the beginning of the novel, Cael’s crew is forced into a crash by a rival scavenger crew led by the Mayor’s son, who is Cael’s greatest enemy. While their ship is severely damaged, they do find a secret garden of fresh vegetables.

The notion of corn being such a powerful, malignant, dark force is not entirely unplausible. While the mutations the modified corn can cause humans (called the Blight) – everything from calcified bumps to husk and stalk like appendages – Wendig extrapolates these things from some interesting facts.Corn shares some of the same DNA as humans and Corn is in 75% of the processed food products in the grocery store. So whether or not corn is actually a malevolent force, it is an unavoidable aspect of our lives and in that sense, Wendig’s Cornpocalypse, Maize-ageddon novel might be one of the most relevant pieces of dystopic fiction in recent years.

Wendig infuses this novel with a great deal of despair and anger, but lifts it up with small tent poles of hope and allows his characters to funnel their rage towards potentially positive goals. All of the characters seem to have varying levels of desperation, even the so-called villains in novel like the aforementioned mayor’s son and the mayor himself.Rigo’s father is a drunk, Cael’s father has strange tumors as a result of the corn, and his mother is bedridden.So yeah, not many smiles to go around.But what makes the novel so damn readable was the drive fueled by Cael’s anger.As I said, he manages to funnel it towards positive ends (most of the time), but of course, the anger does get in the way.

Readers who are fans of Chuck’s previous work (I’ve only read but thoroughly enjoyed The Blue Blazes) will know he doesn’t shy away from coarse language.Although this is a young adult novel, Chuck’s first, one should remember that teenagers tend to use coarse language.In other words, Chuck hasn’t softened his storytelling sensibilities in any way, rather, he focuses it through a slightly different lens.

I couldn’t help but continually draw comparisons between this book and the game Bioshock: Infinite, in terms of the feel of a frontier America mixed with some vaguely steampunk technology and settings both evoked. While Under the Empyrian Sky might not have the Vigor-enabled powers and some of the time-travel elements, the idea of revolting against an imperial overlord and even a city in the sky are similar.

This novel is clearly the first of (at least) a trilogy, it says as much on the cover. Beyond that, Wendig sets up the characters, conflict and most of the world in which the story takes place very well. I say “most of the world” because he’s yet to reveal too much about the Empyrian overlords, aside from an envoy that touches down in Boxelder in the final third of the novel. We don’t get a sense of why the world is in the state it is, we just get a “this is how life is” and the characters themselves. At this point all we need to know is that Cael and the Boxelder people are under the heel of the Empyrian overlords the quiet malevolence of the corn.

The narrative is at what I’d call a comfortable level for the first two thirds of the novel as Wendig introduces the world and characters, but once those elements are on the stage, the final third is exciting and forced me to turn the pages and not put the book down until I finished.I was especially pleased with the revelations that thematically kicked off the final third of the novel and how much it meant to some of the characters.

In conclusion, go and get Under the Empyrian Sky. The book is a great start to a dystopic, cornpunk series that is quite relevant and smartly extrapolates our world into Cael’s world.

Highly Recommended

Skyscape / Amazon Children’s Publishing
978-1-47781-720-9 Hardcover/eBook 354 Pages
The Heartland Trilogy Book 1
Review copy courtesy of the publisher