Cloud isn’t just a place to work. It’s a place to live. And when you’re here, you’ll never want to leave.“A thrilling story of corporate espionage at the highest level . . . and a powerful cautionary tale about technology, runaway capitalism, and the nightmare world we are making for ourselves.”—Blake Crouch, New York Times bestselling author of Dark MatterFilm rights sold to Imagine … Matter
Film rights sold to Imagine Entertainment for director Ron Howard! • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Financial Times • Real Simple • Kirkus Reviews
Paxton never thought he’d be working for Cloud, the giant tech company that’s eaten much of the American economy. Much less that he’d be moving into one of the company’s sprawling live-work facilities.
But compared to what’s left outside, Cloud’s bland chainstore life of gleaming entertainment halls, open-plan offices, and vast warehouses…well, it doesn’t seem so bad. It’s more than anyone else is offering.
Zinnia never thought she’d be infiltrating Cloud. But now she’s undercover, inside the walls, risking it all to ferret out the company’s darkest secrets. And Paxton, with his ordinary little hopes and fears? He just might make the perfect pawn. If she can bear to sacrifice him.
As the truth about Cloud unfolds, Zinnia must gamble everything on a desperate scheme—one that risks both their lives, even as it forces Paxton to question everything about the world he’s so carefully assembled here.
Together, they’ll learn just how far the company will go…to make the world a better place.
Set in the confines of a corporate panopticon that’s at once brilliantly imagined and terrifyingly real, The Warehouse is a near-future thriller about what happens when Big Brother meets Big Business–and who will pay the ultimate price.
Praise for The Warehouse
“A fun, fast-paced read [that] walks a fine line between a near-future thriller and a smart satire . . . makes you wonder if we’re already too far into a disastrous future, or if there’s still some hope for humanity.”—NPR
“I loved The Warehouse, although and because it made my blood run cold. This is what our world could be by this time next year.”—S.J. Rozan, Edgar award-winning author of Paper Son
“An inventive, addictive, Crichton-esque, page-turning, near-future dystopian thriller.”—Paul Tremblay, Stoker award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghostsof Lock Every Door
more
On the surface, The Warehouse is a thrilling story of corporate espionage at the highest level, but dig a little deeper and you’ll find a terrifying cautionary tale of the nightmare world we are making for ourselves.
An inventive, addictive, Crichton-esque, page-turning, near-future dystopian thriller about a corporation ruling over every aspect of our late-capitalism lives. While I hope Rob hasn’t been sent back from the future to warn us, we should heed him regardless.
The nice part about living in a present-day America that edges closer and closer to becoming a full-blown dystopia rife with all kinds of political and capitalism-driven horrors is that it gives authors plenty of raw material to work with. Whether it’s Chuck Wendig’s recent, Wanderers, which used the ascent of a Trump-like president, climate change, and artificial technology to tell of an epic 800-page apocalypse, or Rob Hart’s The Warehouse, it’s hard not to recognize the modern realities that forecast the various states of ruination at the core of these stories.
At an unspecified point in the near future, a massive online retailer has taken over. Economically, commercially, and, to a degree, governmentally, everything belongs to Cloud and its dying, insanely wealthy CEO Gibson Well. Situated on the outskirts of one of America’s many ghost cities lies a MotherCloud facility, a futuristic analog to the company towns where employees live, work, and shop. Among its latest batch of new entry-level hires are Paxton, a former CEO whose company was bought out by Cloud, and Zinnia, an industrial spy whose been tasked with infiltrating Cloud and stealing its secrets.
Presented as a successor to Amazon, Gibson was able to get one over on Bezos with his company, Cloud, by cracking the code to aerial drone delivery and lightweight packaging, a task prodded along by his governmental lobbying and pockets deep enough to allow him to privatize the FAA. Gibson himself is a rather complicated character, which makes him feel all the more real. As he tells of his successes and failures, his dreams and ambitions, Hart paints a fully realized portrait of a man grappling with his legacy as his final days approach. Gibson Wells has changed the world, perhaps even permanently, and what he’s left behind will forever mark mankind with his legacy. As we learn more about him, and the impact his life’s work has made, it becomes quite clear Gibson is hardly the perfect hero he believes himself to be. It’s hard, however, to paint him as a clear-cut, James Bond-type villain, twirling his mustache and rooting for the world to end. He does want to do good, but gives little thought to the consequences of his actions, firmly rooted in an “ends justify the means” mindset. His right-wing libertarian ego prevents him from seeing the harm he’s wrought, but his earnest idealism make him a fairly sympathetic antagonist to humanity.
Like Gibson, Paxton and Zinnia are equally complicated, morally conflicted protagonists. Hart does a wonderful job crafting complex characters and shifting reader’s expectation on how to view them. That a love story develops between these two should be of little surprise if you’ve ever read a thriller before, but the nature of that story and the multiple dimensions it exists within are a beautiful exhibit of the author’s skill as a storyteller. You’re never quite sure how things are going to shake out, who to root for, or when the jig will finally be up. It’s through their eyes that we get the ground-level view of life inside the MotherCloud facility, the sad and hard state of life outside it, and the various shades of grey that permeate their lives and the world around them.
Workers live and breath Cloud. Their homes are onsite, within this gargantuan facility where they work. Each worker is required at all times to wear a smart device, kind of like a FitBit, that tracks their work performance, monitors their location within the facility, provides them with job duties, and allows them access to and from their dormitory, shopping centers, and the community restroom and showers. The MotherCloud is, for all intents and purposes, a prison facility in the panopticon mold, its laborers a willing slave force. They’re paid in company credits, rather than the US Dollar, but if they are fired during a monthly Cut Day they can transfer whatever credits they’ve made to a non-Cloud bank for a nominal service fee and whatever the current exchange rate might be. Employee performance is algorithm-based, so workers on the stock floor are forced to hustle, constantly running from one end of the warehouse to the other to fulfill orders and keep their ranking in the green lest they be hauled off the premises by the blue-shirted security guards. Everything within the Cloud runs on the almighty algorithm. Unions are anathema, workers rights nonexistent, and there are no weekends, no vacations, no sick leave, unless you want to lose a star ranking and risk losing everything. Outside the facility is nothing but the remains of an American town that used to be, its businesses long since shuttered and foreclosed as customers grew to rely on Cloud to fulfill their every whim.
If any of this sounds familiar, it should. Cloud is, of course, a thinly veiled critique on Amazon business practices with a polished 1984 veneer, but also American capitalism and greed run amok. While Amazon enjoys a -1% tax rate on hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue, us working class schmucks are only a few possible, terrible steps removed form the bleak future Hart’s envisioned. Every underwater mortgage, golden parachute, bankrupted competitor, government lobbyist, unchecked monopoly and unfettered monopsony, and cut to education and public welfare programs gets us that much closer to having to choose between our personal freedom and being a wage slave for life without any reasonable alternatives in between. One of the recurring themes in The Warehouse is the issue of choosing the lesser evil. Is it better to have personal freedom and possess nothing, or to have everything provided for you and be nothing?
They say the more things change, the more they stay the same…but it’s also true that a society that forgets its past is doomed to repeat old mistakes. It’s possible that advancements in technology and corporate business ethics could carry us forward into a new epoch, but it’s just as likely they’ll all too easily return us to a messy and difficult past of hardships and human capital in a future where we’ll owe our soul to the company store.
An absolute thriller . . . Using wit, insight, and masterful storytelling, Rob Hart has written a riveting tale that reflects on the state of humanity and where we might be heading. Be prepared for the unexpected and to look at our world through a new twisted lens.
Holy hell, The Warehouse is our future, isn’t it? Imagine that one day we screw up the world and our country so damn bad that we all have to live where we work in what amounts to a modern variant on indentured servitude, and then layer on top of that a bleeding-edge thriller set inside a massively autocratic corporate entity, and you still haven’t seen just how sharp, or scary, this book is. . . . Taut, tense, and masterful.
Paxton didn’t want to work for Cloud. The superstore ruined his life and put him out of business. But he needs a job and Cloud is hiring. Zinnia is on a mission. She needs to infiltrate Cloud, and she can’t get caught. She meets Paxton, who has been selected to work for security. Soon, Paxton and Zinnia become embroiled in a scheme that will shake Cloud to its very foundation.
When I started reading The Warehouse, I was expecting it to be a book that explored how an online business ran with a dash of mystery thrown in. I was not expecting this book to suck me in from the first page. I finished this book within 2 hours. So yeah, it is a fast read. It also had a well-written plotline with almost no lag. There was a tiny bit of lag when Paxton and Zinnia took their trip, but the author was able to bring plotline back.
I liked Paxton. He seemed resigned to the fact that he was going to work for Cloud. He didn’t hold any resentment towards Cloud for making his business to go under. I thought that he was blind to Zinnia’s schemes. How could he not pick up that something wasn’t quite right with her? I mean, he walked in on her using the hospital computer after her accident!! That drove me nuts.
I didn’t quite like Zinnia, but I also didn’t dislike her either. Her reasons for infiltrating Cloud weren’t clear at first. I wasn’t happy that she was using Paxton, but if I were in her situation, I would have done the same thing. She was a strong individual, though. The beatdown that she gave that one guy was epic.
The mystery angle of the book was well written. While the middle of the book did Zinnia’s first part of her mission, there was a second part to it. The twist to that took me by surprise. I wasn’t expecting who it was!!
The dystopian angle of the book, I had no problem believing. I can picture what happened to the world in this book (climate change, gun violence, unemployment) happening in real life. I also have no issue seeing an online company (who I will not name) taking over the world.
I do want to add that I was grossed out about the burgers. I threw up a little in my mouth when it was revealed what they were made of. Talk about gross!!
The end of The Warehouse was pretty standard. There were no dropped storylines. But, I did wonder what happened to Zinnia. I was also thrilled for Paxton and a little mad. What happened to him was not right. I would have flipped my lid if that happened to me.
Set in the near future, THE WAREHOUSE is a cautionary tale about an Amazon-esque company that employs and houses the majority of the population because it’s essentially all that is left. Entire cities and towns are desolate, and the climate crisis has made living conditions outside of Cloud harrowing, if not impossible. Sadly, it’s not difficult to imagine this being eventual reality, and that’s a big part of what makes the story so compelling.
I don’t want to spoil anything about the plot, so I’ll just say that this was a really solid read/listen for me (I alternated between print and audio formats). The world-building was very well done, and it is easy to imagine a film adaptation being successful. In many regards, I think it might even work better on film.
I loved the complexity and layers to the character development for the two protagonists, especially Paxton. It was interesting to see how his motivation for joining Cloud morphed/changed over time based on his experiences working and living there.
I will say that the pacing was great until about the 85% mark. Then things took an unexpected turn, and the ending was rather underwhelming. Usually I love surprises and endings that go in different directions, but here, there were several things that felt unfinished and really changed the tone of the entire story for me.
It took me a while to get into the audiobook narration for this one, which is why I ended up alternating with a digital print copy. The best part of Emily Woo Zeller’s narration is her AI voice. I also loved the voicing for Gibson, the CEO of Cloud, by Jason Culp. That really brought his character to life for me and was far better than just reading his blog posts.
Even despite the ending, I’d recommend this one. There was a lot to appreciate, and although I wish it had been a 5-star read, I’m holding out hope that the film adaptation will provide the more satisfying ending I craved.
RATING: B
(Note: I received a review copy of this title courtesy of the publisher.)
Disturbing dystopian story. Well written. Well drawn characters.
Couldn’t put it down!
The Warehouse by Rob Hart is a book that tells a tale of where we might be in a few decades. In the future, cities and towns have disappeared due to overpopulation and wasteful resource allocation. An omnipresent Amazon-like corporation called The Cloud dominates worldwide commerce and industry. Huge mall-like structures provide everything and anything a person needs. Housing, food, entertainment, employment all under The Cloud. Order online and boom-there it is. Is it a utopia? Far from it. Employees are rated by the number of stars, four being excellent, and one meaning termination. But what happens when somebody wants to challenge the system?
The Warehouse is a terrific cautionary tale filled with well-hewn characters and an entertaining plot. Readers will be left wanting for another look at what goes on in The Warehouse.
The very near future in a recognizable world where delivery exists, and work/life balance does not. Regular people survive in a power utopia that grows bleaker.
I received a copy of this story from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
My first thought was “DON’T read this while practicing social distancing during a pandemic!”
Okay, for real. This book was okay. I actually probably would have given it 4 stars if it hadn’t wrapped up the way it did. I felt like it was building and building to all these things and then they either didn’t pan out or were forgotten or resolved in a crappy way. I finished it feeling cheated.
The corporate espionage angle that was probably meant to be exciting lacked momentum for me. Zinnia is a great character (easily my favorite) but there wasn’t enough surprising action for me. Every new challenge or bit of info she got to further her assignment seemed too perfect. I would be like “ah yes, that makes sense” and I wanted it to be unexpected.
While I think the plot is a little weak, the world-building is fantastic! This absolutely seemed like a direction America could go in in the near future. It was TERRIFYING to think about and for that, I’m glad I’ve read this. Humans could easily mess up Earth so badly that something like this happens. The plausibility here is off the charts.
I don’t know that I’d recommend this book, but I also don’t know that I’d talk someone out of reading it.
I kept setting this one down and then picking it back up and then setting it back down and then picking it back up and then…
You get the picture.
It’s a fantastic concept, and I think an important idea to put forward given the state of the world and where things seem to be heading. I appreciate the intent of offering a glimpse behind the curtain of what can happen when capitalism goes overboard and a monopoly becomes a mega-opoly.
I assume that a lot of the monotony in the story is intentional, dragging you through the days of the characters as they struggle to live in the Cloud-controlled world, but it certainly does not make for an easy, enjoyable, or speedy read. I can appreciate that conceptually, but it doesn’t make for a glowing recommendation…
I just never found myself able to connect with any of the characters, and when you add that to the monotonous tone, particularly for a book billed as a thriller, I found it a bit of a disappointment. To me this isn’t a thriller, and it isn’t a dark vision of the future, so much as a satiric look at what happens when capitalism is taken to the extreme.
I’ve seen comparisons to Animal Farm – to me, there is no comparison. Animal Farm was written as an engaging tale as well as a cautionary one. This felt entirely like the latter without much of the former. While it is definitely a thought-provoking and important consideration for our times, to me it did not exactly make for a compelling read…
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for my review copy.
This reads like Michael Crichton. It’s a great thriller and a cautionary tale rolled into one.
The Warehouse takes place in the not so distant future where a company called Cloud has basically taken over everything. Most small businesses have closed their doors. Climate change has created an extremely hot environment. However, Cloud is thriving. Once they figured out how to use drones for delivery, the company really skyrocketed. They are the main source of all goods as well as most jobs and they are environmentally conscious. What could be wrong?
The story alternates between 3 story lines. Gibson Wells is the founder of Cloud and is dying of cancer. He hasn’t named his replacement yet and is on a farewell tour of as many Cloud facilities as possible.
Paxton worked as a prison security guard for many years before creating an invention and leaving to start his business. Cloud was partly responsible for shutting Paxton’s business down. He now finds himself in need of a job and applying for Cloud. He would love to tell Gibson Wells exactly what Cloud did to his business.
Zinnia works in corporate espionage. She’s been hired by an unknown person to infiltrate Cloud and bring back information. She finds herself at the same hiring session with Paxton. Her job is clear – get in, get the information and move on. She doesn’t have time to develop ties.
As Paxton and Zinnia spend time together, their relationship develops. Paxton does not want Cloud to be his future and Zinnia can’t stay there. The beginning of the book is somewhat of a slow development but the end is full of surprises and suspense. This is definitely a dystopian book, which I find stressful and upsetting, but it’s very well written and the characters are developed nicely. It’s a really good read but left me with a knot in the pit of my stomach. This book does not tie everything up in a pretty bow. Fans of dystopian literature will really enjoy this book.
It’s the future, and it’s has already started. You see signs of it already today.
Full review posted on my blog http://www.premeditatedfiction.com/book-review-the-warehouse-by-rob-hart/
A different kind of dystopian, and frightening because it’s true. We’re in a time of tremendous societal change, the greatest since the Industrial Revolution: the effect of automation on labor, the gig economy, the future of work, changing nature of the social network, loss of economic security, loss of privacy, the implications of living under what amounts to constant surveillance, our willing abdication to commercial interests of the government’s role in ensuring our right to work, our right to have a family family, our very lives. Rob Hart packs a lot in an ingenuous story. Always entertaining, never preachy, The Warehouse will give you plenty to think about it.
A chilling and all too believable portrait of a not-so-far-off future.
Fast-paced and unputdownable, thrilling and ominous, The Warehouse is a terrifying object lesson of a story that will haunt you each time you see a box on the front step—and make you wonder what color your shirt will be one day.