In House of Stairs, William Sleator proves just how quickly humans can be stripped of their humanity. Maybe take that left instead of your usual right and see what it can lead to, because before you know it the cycle is complete. She's had to learn a lot in her time, and doesn't look to others to decide what she should or should not do.

While it's a little far fetched that Peter comes out of the stairs not only able to resist the temptation to give in to despair, but as a healthier, more well adjusted person, I think that it makes the book better, and provides some germ of hope that not everyone is doomed to be an Oliver, Abigail, or Blossom. Guilt, culpability, love, obsession, desire, greed, past tragedies, and family legacies are recurring themes in Elizabeth's story.They discover that it only works when the lights are flashing and it begins to whisper unintelligibly. Five sixteen-year-old orphans are abducted and relocated to a house filled with nothing but sets of endless staircases, a landing with running water and a flashing machine that forces them to play mind games for food. Blossom was affluent up until her only recently becoming an orphan, she was the only fat individual, and the only character I would consider to be genuinely deceptive and deviant in nature. Injured, they eventually can think of no more cruelty to dispense other than antagonizing Lola and Peter.

Vine does not limit herself to recounting past occurrences, instead she allows her characters to re-examine their own actions, as well as attempting to understand the motivations behind those of others.

The story’s confinement within the unsettling structure and its true character responses makes House of Stairs a truly timeless piece of fiction. Under such circumstances, it usually doesn't take long for humans to throw off the shackles of civilized conduct and resort to a more brutal "survival of the fittest" approach. Because of this book, near the beginning of season one of LOST I was already predicting the cages and fish-biscuits that would show up in season three.

What follows is pretty tame by today’s standards, and in my books does not hold a candle to Lord of the Flies; however, it still makes for pure, unadulterated compulsive reading.

America in the distant future is a Crapsack World with little room to live, hardly any food to eat and even less to go around for the disadvantaged. Thanks to that module, which was in every other respect a huge waste of time (lecturer on Tom Ripley: "he does bad things because he wants more stuff". She is extraordinarily beautiful, bearing a strong resemblance to Bronzino’s portrait of Lucrezia Panciatichi. Having reread it, it's safe to say that my memory of the book wasn't quite accurate, but it's a story that seems to have held up over time, quite well. I had some small gripes like the characters sometimes feel a lot younger than they are, and there’s some gross description of a fat character.

Vine has not only produced a quietly smouldering suspense novel but also presents an accurately atmospheric portrayal of London in the heady 60's. Elizabeth faces a genetic heritage of Huntington's chorea, while getting her career as novelist on track. At first it seems Abigail is more resilient character of those two, but as we soon find out she's even more emotionally compromised than Peter was.For a while, it feeds them if they all cooperate on an elaborate dance when the lights start flashing. The second timeline, narrated from the retrospective, focuses on their past, and in particular on the events leading to that ‘one big event’. It was fairly short which I felt worked in it's favor, keeping the story from getting too monotonous. I found her exciting in a disturbing way, a soul-shacking way, without knowing in the least what I wanted of her.