A to Z: Underground

Underground is the region below the Earth's surface. It is dark and therefore considered lifeless, although in truth the soil teems with microbes and insects, a community of living organisms with as many as 170,000 species. But generally underground is represented as the land of the dead, where human souls were once thought to reside and where the damned must spend their eternity. Not many people work underground, but miners still do, spending their days in cramped tunnels, and subway workers maintaining the underground transportation  system in cities such as New York must sometimes descend deep into the Earth to carry out their jobs. Sometimes they are attacked by rats in the subway tunnels. Other hazards of being underground include getting lost in caves, which sometimes happens to spelunkers exploring labyrinths deep underground.

It's one of my recurring fears, getting trapped underground, cut off from all possibility of rescue, and so when I wrote SAVIOR, it was the worst fate i could imagine in which to place my character, Al Lyons -- in a prison complex deep below the Canadian oil tar sands, where he could die and never be found. The pressure cooker of isolation is one of the worst feelings we know. People are social creatures by instinct, although sometimes we wall ourselves off intentionally or unintentionally from others out of our very anxiety to escape the ultimate fate and evil of death. We sometimes hope that some unknown power or destiny will ride in to our rescue, but in the end, most of the time we have to save ourselves by tunneling until we see the light of day. How do we keep going? Where do we find inspiration? That is a question I think I am always trying to answer.

SAVIOR is available as an Amazon Kindle Ebook. Go to SAVIOR and pick up your copy, and then check back here throughout the A to Z challenge month to learn more about SAVIOR and additional publication month details.