Review: Kit Reed creates 'Enclave' rich with social commentary

In Kit Reed's latest novel, Enclave, the world isn't ending, though former Marine officer Sargent Whitemore will try to convince you otherwise. As Sarge sees it, the world is diseased and society is the carrier, but he has a plan to change things: Clothos, an academy set in an old monastery isolated by cliffs on a Mediterranean island.

For extremely wealthy parents, Clothos presents a chance to push away their children, social princes and princesses who embarrass the family name. For Sarge, starting the academy is a grand social experiment, a way to break down hooligans and build them up into people who contribute to a healthy society. "They are mine to form and watch over and take care of," he tells us.

At first, Sarge seems successful at subduing 100 previously unruly children and teenagers. But "the clamor of a hundred restless souls trapped here on his mountain, struggling to be released" can only be ignored for so long. When two viruses, one a computer program and one a biological pathogen, enter the school, they quickly eat away at the structure Sarge has built. What seemed like an inviolable plan for order quickly disintegrates.

With Enclave, Reed manages to combine the claustrophobic horrors of Scott Smith's The Ruins with the psychology of Lord of the Flies and The Masque of the Red Death.

For readers who think of science fiction as the tired product of paranoid pessimists, Enclave offers something fresh, doing what good speculative fiction has always done: exploring how we confront the world as we know it. Reed gives us more than just a story about forced conformity; she considers the implications of playing god, as well as the extent of parental love in showing just how willingly some parents push their problem children onto someone else. She also balances paranoia with hope. The people who control the information have the power, but Reed shows that even they can't know everything.

Vikas Turakhia is a high school English teacher in Ohio.