The lights flicker off, you hear sounds, screams in the distance. Someone, something is coming. No, you think the creaking floorboards are not someone walking toward you, it’s the sound of an old house. You try to calm yourself down, but questions fill your mind. Why are the lights off? The power is off, right? Nothing wrong, nothing to worry about, nothing to be afraid of. You aren’t scared of the dark, so why are you afraid?

The oceans rose, swallowing up the lowlands. Earthquakes shattered the continents, toppling entire region into the rising water. Now, humans live packed into stack cities. The only ones with any space of their own are those who live on the ocean floor, the Dark Life. This is what its like in Dark Life by Kat Falls.Ty lives in the dark, there is always something to be afraid of. He was the first to be born subsea. Living in the dark with mysterious creatures swimming around, is not the safest, but its sure a lot better than being trapped in a one room apartment and the sweltering heat. The Dark Life does have other challenges of its own, outlaws raid supply ships heading to the ocean floor. Supplies are getting smaller by the day, luckily most of their supplies they provide for themselves. The Seablite Gang roams the sea, looking for a place to make some trouble. And rumors float around that the water pressure is making the children abnormal, and the government wants to test them like lab rats.

During all this, Ty finds time to travel to the mainland to see if he can find any of the old east coast, maybe the Statue of Liberty. Of course he fails to see it. Retreating back down, he explores an abandoned ship, and is surprised by a Topsider, Gemma, a runaway searching for her brother, Richard. Ty offers to help her find him. As Gemma stays in the settlement, she learns more on their struggles, and way of life. The Seablite Gang continues to torture the pioneers. They turned off Ty’s neighbors’ power, it was up to Ty to turn it back on, before the house collapsed, and the tropical fish died because of the cold. Ty’s dad was on land and not there to help him. Afterwards Ty encounters the leader of the gang, Shade. Will Ty slip away from Shade’s grasp? Will Gemma find her brother? Will the settlements survive the government’s favoritism toward Topside? The answer to all these questions you will find in Dark Life by Kat Falls.

Dark Life does have some action, but I wish the action was more in detail. The book is fast paced, if it were stretched out a little more, there would be room for those descriptions. Like when the Seablite Gang raids the neighbor’s house, it seems as if it moves quickly, when in real life it would be slow, panicky process.

Even though the book does lack some descriptions in the action areas, when describing the scenery/setting, a clear image of the scene comes in my head. One of my favorite descriptions was when the author was describing what it looked like inside the abandoned ship. "Blood dripped from every surface in the gear room- walls, benches, lockers- wet and glistening, it puddled the prospecting tools that littered the floor. I slowed my breath as if it would lessen the metallic tang that now filled my nose- a stink that conjured up the blood slick deck of a whaling ship." You get the real sense of what it looked, smelled, and sounded like.

This book will open your minds to the possibility of living under the sea. It will impress you with its details of the setting. It will widen your curiosity of what we’re doing now and how it will affect those in the future. Dark Life will expand your thoughts of the impossible in present day, that will become possible in the future. It will increase your knowledge on world-ending type situations. And most of all it will make your mind wonder, if living in the dark is all that bad and if you have something to be afraid of, something that makes chills run up your back.