Rage Within (Dark Inside #2)

Jeyn Roberts’ sequel to Dark Inside, Rage Within provides vignettes of major protagonists just before massive earthquakes and a mass-murder apocalypse transform the world. Picking up six weeks later, presumably after the events of the first book, it follows the exploits of a band of survivors who have found each other in Vancouver, British Columbia. The Baggers, a subset of humans who have spontaneously become ruthlessly homicidal and well-organized, are hunting survivors down, and taking some to a holding area downtown. Group leader Aries manages her band through the losses and instability of a changed world until the two enigmatic men she has befriended both vanish, prompting her to lead the rag-tag collection of young adults in a raid on the Baggers’ compound. Roberts uses a shifting perspective with each chapter, bouncing back and forth between the main characters’ points of view, with each having several chapters bearing their name, except one. By noting which one is absent from the chapter name rotation, and noting that there is an occasional ominously-written chapter bearing the title NOBODY which seems to take a Bagger’s point of view, the eventual betrayal of the group by one of Aries’ associates is well-telegraphed. When it is later revealed that the same character is, with effort, able to suppress his Bagger side and vows to keep his distance for everyone else’s safety, it becomes apparent that he fits tidily into a broody, dangerous, but common genre trope. The book as a whole follows a similar pattern, promising innovation in modern dystopian storytelling, but ultimately unable to break out of comfortable and well-worn ruts of the stories which have gone before.

• Rage Within (Dark Inside #2) by Jeyn Roberts
• Secondary
• Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
• 357 pp.
• Published 2012
• ISBN 978-1-44242-354-1
• $17.99
• Supernatural