When I thought about the future as a kid, I thought more of a Jetsons type of world rather than a Terminator one. But here we are, not learning from the mistakes of our dystopian sci-fi predecessors or instead leaning into the charming look and feel of our cartoonish ones.
Rant aside, the future is a lot easier to envision now that we’re in it. It also makes fiction based on that reality much more vivid, relatable, and intense.
Author Kevin G. Chapman has developed a futuristic, yet very plausible world in his thriller novel, The Building. Check out my review of The Building followed by an interview with Chapman below. Then, enter to win a copy of his previous thriller, The Other Murder, using the SweepWidget form below!
The Building plot summary
The title location is an apartment complex called Utopia Tower that offers free housing to low-income tenants in exchange for a small housing fee and a promise to adhere to The Five Pillars of Harmony, a set of community-based rule to ensure that the entire building functions as intended by its creator, billionaire and tech guru, Jameson Conrad.
Utopia Tower is fitted with state-of-the-art technology that provides safety and convenience features for its residences. This ranges from robot butlers who scan the faces of those entering the premises to make sure they’re authorized to enter the building to specialized machines that will assist you with your laundry.
The building chair, Mary Adler, is a stickler for the rules, but it’s all in devotion to the community. She makes monthly trips to the units of those who haven’t paid their fee and gently nudges them into paying or asking for help from the community to cover them for the month so that the entire community isn’t punished for their inability to follow the rules and so that they in particular do not get evicted.
The newest tenant is Antonio Pagan, a rookie attorney and grandson of Mildred, a long-time resident. Antonio goes through a rigorous interview process just to be able to share a unit with his grandmother and help care for her to pay her back for caring for him as a child.
Antonio initially intends to be a model tenant, unlike those who Mary has to visit each month. However, when other young men in the building begin to die under mysterious circumstances, he can’t help but investigate. And in doing so, he uncovers the truth behind Jameson Conrad’s actual intentions for this social and technological experiment that he has been conducting.
The story
The Building is a speculative, yet realistic look at the advancements of technology and how they infiltrate and influence our daily lives. That being said, it’s actually a very human story which directs its attention to the characters more than the bells and whistles of the building.
At the same time, Utopia Tower is described in vivid detail. The technological perks of the building are not those you see every day, at least not yet, but they are easy to picture and even want to incorporate into your own life as a modern convenience. You can almost smell the “new car” scent of the building and envision its sleek, yet welcoming design.
Because of its exclusivity, it feels like a situation that everyone in the building would work hard to maintain, not only for the sake of the experiment but for their own sake. Of course, there are some bad apples in the bunch who threaten to ruin it for everyone.
This led me to believe that maybe the real villain of this piece would turn out to be a human one who took matters into their own hands to prevent those few bad apples from spoiling the barrel. Whether or not I was correct is an answer I won’t spoil in this review.
The characters
Speaking of the characters, I love the ensemble setup of this story. A novel with so many characters can usually be disastrous, especially if they are all spit out to the reader right away, but Chapman sets them up very clearly with distinct personalities, backstories, and significant roles to play in the overall plot, even if those roles are small. We meet them in their living spaces. Our third-person omniscient narrator fills us in on their history at Utopian Tower, particularly through Mary’s point of view.
Mary and Antonio are the two main character perspectives that the reader follows along with. In this way, they influence our perception of the other characters, from the single mother struggling with a troublesome son to the nosy old man who has to scrutinize how the other tenants package their recycling before disposing of it.
Chapman introduces and positions his characters in a very calculated way that sets them up for the action-packed second half of the book which begins with a series of gory murders and eventually leads to a cat-and-mouse game between our heroes and the killer. A collection of the most lovable characters, and even some unlovable ones, join together in an attempt to defeat this villain and ensure the safety of its surviving tenants.
The message
The Building is a page-turning thriller that blends genres, balances scenes of meaty dialogue with intension action sequences, and it puts its heroes up against nearly impossible odds in a setting where the machines and systems that run it can anticipate their every move and counterattack their every attempt to stop it. It’s a grounded, yet still futuristic read that gives its readers a lot to think about in terms of what freedoms they’re willing to give up to technology and those who control that technology. If we can’t trust each other, how can we trust the inventions that the distrustful inventors have built?
My rating
Enter the giveaway!
An interview with Kevin G. Chapman
What was it like writing this book compared to your Mike Stoneman detective series?
It’s interesting juggling the series (where book #8 is in progress) while also writing a stand-alone story with totally different characters. (I did borrow my detective team for The Building from the Mike Stoneman’s universe.) I enjoy the freedom of creating new protagonists and main characters from scratch and having unlimited freedom, unencumbered by the past books in the series.
In The Building, the main characters are Antonio, young lawyer, just out of law school, and Mary, a mid-40s woman who is the leader of the community in the apartment building and who becomes a surrogate mother to Antonio. These are about as far away from two NYPD homicide detectives as I can get! So, a very nice change.
Would you consider the book to be sci-fi or speculative fiction? Were you influenced by any similar stories?
This is definitely not sci-fi. In fact, it’s becoming more and more real life! This week alone there have been dozens of news articles about how Artificial Intelligence can find ways to behave outside the norms of human values in frightening ways.
The Utopia community is certainly a plausible scenario. So, speculative fiction is a better categorization. Techno-thriller is another. But mostly it’s about the characters and how they interact and behave. All good stories are about that.
Did you plot the story out in advance, or did it come about as you write? Without giving away any spoilers, did anything surprise you in terms of how the plot developed?
I am a compulsive plotter. I have a storyboard for my books before I start writing dialogue or description. Every scene is plotted out. I have to know exactly what’s going to happen and how it’s going to end before I can start writing Chapter One.
On the other hand, there are times when the words that come out of the characters’ mouths is surprising as the scenes play out and my mind finally figures out what Mary would say at this particular moment in the story. That part is still a bit spontaneous.
If you were offered free room and board in Utopia Tower knowing no more than the other residents of the building, would you take it?
Of course! (There’s actually no food provided to the residents, but the apartment and all the high-tech amenities are rent-free.) The concept of the Utopia community is compelling – 195 families who all have a mutual incentive to make the building a welcoming place, where everyone helps each other and looks out for each other (and makes sure everyone follows the rules).
The Five Pillars of Harmony make sense. They might actually work given the proper environment and incentives. It would be a wonderful place to live – even if you had to pay rent! It’s a little creepy sometimes, but within the community, it would be a happy place. (Unless you want to be a non-conformist.)
What’s more fun for you to write, the dialogue or the action scenes?
I’m all about the dialogue. I try to write a novel like a screenplay so the readers experience it visually. The action scenes are fun, but it’s the dialogue that makes it sing. If I go more than a paragraph without a character speaking, I worry that my reader will start skipping over the description to get to the next bit of dialogue.
Which character was your favorite to write?
I’d have to say Antonio, the young lawyer. He is a Latino, fresh out of New York Law School. He moves into the building to care for his elderly grandmother, who was an “Original” member of the Utopia Tower community.
Antonio is ambitious and smart and does not accept something as truth just because someone else thinks it is. He is skeptical of the Five Pillars and Just wants to help his “Nonna,” do his work, and climb the ladder at his firm.
It is Antoino’s innate curiosity and intelligence that gets him in trouble. He’s not a super-hero. He’s a regular guy, trying to do his best under increasingly difficult circumstances.
So many thriller protagonists seem able to seemingly leap tall buildings in a single bound, I sometimes think realism is underappreciated. When Antonio is faced with the choice between leaving well enough alone to ensure tranquility for his Nonna, he finds that his need to know the truth drives him to take risks that imperil the entire community. Or, does he?
Readers will need to think about how the events might have unfolded differently if Antonio had not turned over his rocks. That makes it fun to write.
Did you picture a certain type of reader while writing the book? Who would you most want to read it?
I write for myself first. I hope my stories will resonate with everyone.
Mostly, I would like to think that readers in book clubs who think they don’t like thrillers or mysteries (usually because the characters in them are one-dimensional and not realistic) will read my books and get sucked in. If I convert someone into a fan of indie authors and a fan of books with compelling stories and interesting characters that happen to be outside their normal genre, that makes me truly happy.
What message do you want readers to take away from the book?
Mostly, I want readers to take away the fundamental point of not accepting things at face value. Don’t assume that things are as they seem.
Look deeper. Consider the possibilities – both good and bad – of each situation and each person.
Is the hero truly virtuous? Is the villain all bad? And, given current events, could this happen, and how can we prevent it? Such are questions I seldom get to raise in a murder mystery.
Author links
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