The Unwind Series: a Critique (Caution: Spoilers)

Well, Neil Shusterman can spin a compelling yarn, and he’s certainly ... prolific. Yes, he can really string events together in chronological order. He can write down a whole lot of words, that he can do very well.



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But that’s where anything positive I can say ends. The content of the Unwind series is FAR too gruesome and horrific for the intended audience (ages 12 and up?!)

I remember reading reviews of The Hunger Games series that called them inappropriately violent for young readers, but Unwind makes The Hunger Games look like Goodnight Moon. The Pit and the Pendulum is quaint by comparison; the Game of Thrones world is pastoral and wholesome next to the sociopathic coldness and complete nihilism chronicled here. This series haunted me even worse than American Psycho, and that's saying something.

Our main three characters are thinly drawn and generic: Connor is The Cool Bad Boy of course, Lev is The Brainwashed Fundie, and Risa, well, um ... she’s The Girl. (When it comes to writing believable, psychologically complex female characters, Gustave Flaubert he is not.) The cruel actions of these teens' parents and guardians are so contrived they’re laughable; I’ve seen people give their Starbucks orders more careful consideration than these people put into deciding to send their teenage children off to be killed — pardon me, Unwound.

So our main characters and a few supporting players end up at the Happy Jack Harvest Camp (!!!) whereupon the real fun starts. The surgical “unwinding” of Roland (from the conscious dissectee's point of view) made me literally gag — I had to put the book aside after that.

After awhile I did finish the first book and tried to get through some of the sequels, but by the time the parts pirates and the harvest airship and automated Unwinding machines were introduced, the story devolves into pure torture porn on the level of the Hostel movies, just a repetitive series of ever-escalating atrocities with no sympathetic characters or redeeming literary value whatsoever. I was getting so repulsed I could hardly force my eyes down the page.

Indeed, the way Shusterman physically dissects, dismantles, and sometimes willy nilly reassembles, his cast of characters (remember these are mostly minor children) gets so over the top so fast that all emotional impact ends up lost; after my initial nauseous reaction I was starting to picture their limbs, organs, eyes, and brain segments getting popped on and off of their bodies like so many LEGO minifigs or Mr. Potato Heads. The introduction of Rewound characters (new people put together out of Unwound body parts) was painfully gratuitous — did we really need to meet Dirk the rape golem? Or Dr. Rodin, who is the human equivalent of Sid the evil kid from Toy Story who broke toys into their component parts and put them back together as weird mutated freaks? Only this time, the evil character is randomly slapping together parts made from -- and onto -- real, live human children.

I can’t believe that English teachers are being asked to teach these books in schools — that’s just the worst kind of pandering to Philistinism. (Anything to try to engage the jaded attention of their students, I suppose.) You can try to convince me that these detailed descriptions of the live vivisection of (conscious!) children are supposed to be a metaphor for the way that modern society unfeelingly chews kids up and spits them out, but I’m not buying it.

These stories aren’t satirizing the cold narcissism of today’s society; they’re glorifying it. The Unwind series is ultimately just as exploitive, callous, and sadistic as the social corruption it pretends to despise.