What would the world be like if Amazon ran everything: From housing to entertainment to food production? Rob Hart’s new novel The Warehouse gives a peak at that scenario with a thriller that explores a world governed with corporate diligence.

The Warehouse [digital galley, Random House] is set in the near future where The Cloud runs most of the economy by employing, housing and feeding workers in an environment regulated by technology. Those who can’t get jobs at The Cloud find themselves living in a dystopian world of chronic unemployment. But someone is suspicious of the corporation’s success and has infiltrated one of its facilities to find out what’s really powering the company’s success.

Unfortunately there are too many holes in the plot and an incongruous ending made me question whether the bad guys were really that bad after all. And if so, what was the point of all of the sneaking around early in the book.

The Warehouse

by Rob Hart

Blake Crouch told me to read this book.

Ok, not personally, but still.

Initially, I read the first chapter, shrugged and put it down, slightly discouraged by the glossy magazine-sheen styled tone.

Then I received a BookBub email with Blake Crouch’s recommendation to read The Warehouse.

Having just acknowledged in my last B3 post that I might in fact jump off a bridge if the man suggested, I figured it was reasonable to read his book recommendation instead.

Naturally, I finished The Warehouse within a couple days because as the narrators and perspectives switched so did the tone of the book, making it as palatable as a CloudBurger at LivePlay. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Enter a world where The Cloud is king. Naturally, said world has gone to pot: climate change makes temperatures unendurable, unemployment is ubiquitous, water unpotable, meat scarce, and prospects dire for small business. But at The Cloud, with fully stocked shelves of shiny goods, air-conditioned dorm rooms, built-in healthcare and tram cars, not to mention LivePlay entertainment and readily available Cloud Burgers, life is good. Well, not necessarily good, but tolerable. Well, not necessarily tolerable, but air-conditioned.

So what if the shifts are 12 hours long, or there’s a $6 bank transfer charge, or you get docked ratings for not volunteering for extra work time? And so what if the bathrooms are constantly out of order, or the cinderblock rooms are the size of closets or your every move is tracked with a wristband?

The Warehouse is like if The Circle were written about Amazon and Apple combined featuring Steve Jobs and Lisbeth Salander set to an employee training video.

But don’t you enjoy having everything delivered at the click of a button? And for a such a reasonable cost? Have you ever wondered after you click “buy now” who is paying for the deficit?

Terrifyingly Realistic

I haven’t read a book that had me thinking “oh, this is going to happen” since my last great Technothriller by Eliot Peper. I’d seen rumblings about this book when it first came out (and a lot of bloggers I knew had ARCs of it) but I don’t remember reading any of their reviews for it. Thankfully, I still took the dive on it and boy am I glad I did. This book is fantastic. Easily one of the best books I’ve read this year.

Hart is able to write a book that takes all of the things that big tech companies are doing today and take it one step further. The Warehouse is a combination of a lot of currently operating businesses but it really felt like if Apple and Amazon had a baby that was raised by the Walton (Walmart) family. The “no currency, but you can get paid in Cloud money” is straight from Apple. The entire business model is Amazon and the owner reminded me of the Walton’s if they got into tech. Just terrifying.

I honestly could write a paper on all of the topics within The Warehouse – it had so many little things going on that were fascinating to me. Just know if you’ve read any articles or watched any news stories about Amazon’s warehouses, their 1-day deliveries, the way they treat their employees, etc and thought “I won’t what will happen when Amazon gets even more powerful” – this book is definitely for you.

Hart doesn’t touch on it too much but the world outside of Cloud sounded realistic and scary – it felt like it was a post-collapse world where Cloud had pretty much caused almost every other store to go out of business. I kind of pictured run-down cities (but they couldn’t be too run down because Cloud was very busy with people ordering products).

"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."

Wow... I felt like I was reading about Amazon! "Cloud" is extremely intriguing and messed up, especially how they balance work and personal living. Rob Hart created the perfect world balance of near-future, realistic, and a creep factor that makes you want to keep reading more. The perfect book for all dystopian readers! A complete page-turner. This will really make me think the next time I order from Amazon.

Highly Recommend!

*Many thanks to NetGalley & Crown Publishing for the ARC, all opinions are my own.

This book is disturbing....but a great read!

America has been taken over by Cloud, a corporation that has control of the economy and the government. Free enterprise is gone.....most private business was destroyed by Cloud. There are few jobs and people will do anything to secure one. Everything is controlled by Cloud in one way or another. What was touted as an effort to improve the world has become a destroyer instead. How far will the corporation go to protect its dark secrets?

Obviously, this story is a thinly veiled horror/dystopian tale about a company like Amazon growing so powerful and all-encompassing that it destroys American society and the economy. This book is like an updated, more modern version of Orwell's 1984. The corporation is always watching. The corporation controls everything. And those who challenge the corporation disappear. All hail the corporation. It's a scary picture of what society might become.

As someone who grew up in pre-internet days, I see the drastic changes in our daily life, culture and economy since computers have pretty much become a necessity. Our social interactions are different. Our economy is different. Education is different. Nearly everything is different. While instant access to information is an awesome tool....some changes cause me concern. After finishing this book, I sat back and just let those thoughts run through my head. Are the changes a good thing? Or are all the changes causing more stress, more difficulty and a loss of freedom, rather than the freedom we all thought instant information would bring?

Thought provoking. Distressing. Mesmerizing. Great story! Enjoyed it! I will definitely read more by this author, even though his tale made me extremely uncomfortable. I think I need to read a cute story about a talking dog or something now.....gotta get this cautionary tale out of my head.

**I voluntarily read a review copy of this book from Crown Publishing via NetGalley. All opinions expressed are entirely my own.**

In a word: Fantastic. Believable. Frightening. Terrifying. Disgusting. Fantastic. (Yes, twice)

It’s a story about our world just a little ways down the road. We’re not there yet, but the way we’re all going, it’s a very possible endgame.

This particular future focuses on a company similar to Amazon called Cloud. We love our convenience, even if other people or the planet have to suffer for it. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to be self-righteous. I’m guilty. I have a Prime membership. I want my stuff approximately… NOW. While it’s not really ever preached about or harped on, this societal mentality is present throughout the entire narrative.

This book is much more than an interesting premise, though. There’s also a story about a man struggling over working for the very company that put him out of business, a woman who’s actually there as a corporate spy, and their subsequent meeting which turns into a relationship of convenience? Lies? Genuine feelings? Trick is, you don’t really know which ones are real and which are just BS. Even the characters we’re riding around with don’t seem to know completely.

Then there’s Gibson, the CEO of Cloud. We’re treated to a running series of blog entries from the entrepreneur as he gives us some history on himself and this massive mega-company he’s built. That probably sounds dry, but I have to be honest, they might be my favourite parts. Maybe it was satisfying the part of me that enjoys biographies, or maybe it felt like a beginners course in business and economics, but each time I turned the page to find a “blog post”, I got pretty excited.

In a First Impression Friday post, I predicted 4.5 stars and I’m happy to report I was wrong. This is a 5-star read all the way. I can’t think of a single thing to complain about. Not even a nitpick. I enjoyed this from the first page to the last.

Cloud is not just a place to work, but a place to live with a ranking and rating system to keep you striving to always be your best! We follow the creator of Cloud on his last tour, Paxton who thinks this is best opportunity though he’s not happy Cloud has essentially been a problem in his life and Zinnia who is undercover..but for what purpose?

This takes a harsh look at where our civilization is going and how some things unfortunately never change despite the lessons we should have already learned. Corporate America. The want and need of those high ratings because we are now virtually trained to react to these. It's like a mix of Facebook on crack salted with an itsy bitsy bit of Black Mirror. Not gonna lie, if the world went to (further) shit and I was afforded and opportunity to work in a place like this, I would be tempted. Just remember, everything comes at a price.

What an unexpected surprise! It’s written in 11 sections with chapters written in the voice of the three main characters and various chapters in the form of a message. I will say I glazed over sometimes during the owner’s chapters. I was way more intrigued with Paxton and Zinnia. Around the last couple chapters I had that “I KNEW IT!” moment, but I didn’t really know it y’all. 🤦🏻‍♀️. It’s in these last chapters that the book really captured me and I turned the last page seriously saying out loud, “Well now THAT was so good!” There’s not crazy twist but there are some verrrry interesting surprises. 🍔 And while I thought some sections dragged a tiny bit, once I finished I appreciated all the depth in the characters. Love it when a book surprises me in the unexpected ways.

Anybody wanna grab a Cloudburger? 😏

You load sixteen drones, and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt…

It’s the near future, and the giant company Cloud dominates the economy with its massive warehouses that are essentially cities where the employees live and work. However, the CEO of Cloud, Gibson Wells, has just announced that he’s dying of cancer so there’s change on the horizon as a couple of new employees meet during the hiring process. Paxton’s dream of running his own business was destroyed by Cloud, but now he needs a job so he finds himself on a security team. Zinnia acts like just another person looking for work, but in reality she’s been paid by a mysterious client to infiltrate Cloud and uncover some of its secrets.

Unfortunately, it’s hard for Zinnia to find holes in Cloud’s security, and even harder when she is worn out from long shifts spent running to fill orders. A relationship with Paxton might be her best way to complete her mission, but can she use him like that if she actually likes the guy?

On the surface this seems like your standard dystopian tale with some idealistic folks trying to take down an evil corporation, but this book is deeper and more subtle than that. For starters, the characters aren’t stereotypes. You might expect Paxton to be bitter and angry about his company being destroyed by Cloud and having to go to work for them, but he’s actually a guy who still believes that he can achieve his dreams by good ideas and hard work. Zinnia isn’t a radical trying to change the world either. She’s a mercenary doing a job for money, and while she has no love for Cloud she’s not looking to take it down either.

We also hear from Gibson Wells in the form of messages he’s releasing as he does a final farewell tour of the company he built, and that includes some of his history. At first his folksy tale of how he started Cloud with little more than an idea and some furniture scavenged from a closed school gives us the impression that this is the American dream taken to its fullest potential. Especially when Wells lays out that part of his goal for creating the Cloud facilities was to provide good jobs while helping to stave the increasing ravages of climate change by making the greenest facilities possible. It all sounds very reasonable, maybe even honorable. Yet as we learn more and more about how Cloud actually works Wells’ defense of his business tactics start to ring increasingly hollow.

For example, all the Cloud employees are on a rating system where their performance is constantly evaluated and a star value assigned which Wells explains came from his old grade school days when he always tried to get all the points possible on his assignments. That sounds good, but when average performance might get you fired then it’s a constant battle to be great, even perfect. Which then means that the standards shift to a point where people literally have to run themselves ragged to meet the minimum performance level.

Another thing the book does an excellent job at is showing just how falling into a routine might be the most dangerous and depressing aspect of all. There are several points where both Paxton and Zinnia get into the rut of just doing their job, returning to their small apartments, watching TV, falling asleep, and then doing it again. This, more than anything, might be the thing that lets Cloud flourish. If your employees have to expend so much physical and mental energy to get through an average workday that they just want to collapse into a stupor every night then they’re never going to have the time or gumption to try and shake things up in any way.

So this is a well written book with a timely message that I thought it was excellent. It also depressed the hell out of me because I read it on device I got from the company that Cloud is obviously based on. Now I’m posting a review on a website owned by that same corporation. Even though I don’t directly work for that company it’s changed my life in many ways, and I went along with it because it was cheap and convenient without wondering too much where it all ends. Oops.

Even worse is that after reading this now, at a time when billionaires make the rules and the bottom line is used to justify everything they do, I don’t see a way that it gets better without humanity going all the way down Fury Road and just starting over.

But hey, it’s still a good book so go ahead and read it. Just maybe try to find a copy in an independent bookstore.

The Warehouse is so close to nonfiction that it’s more terrifying than any phantom or zombie or fantasy creature could ever be. While the plot pulls from standard thriller conventions, the foundational problems revealed herein are alarming. The most horrific notion is that we are already so far down the path that changing course may be impossible. We’re already living in the warehouse and show no inclination to alter our situation. After all, we can tap a button and consume just about anything we could ever want. What could be bad about that?

AH—MA—ZING!!!!

Couldn’t put this one down, and when I wasn’t turning the pages, it was in my head. So relevant and thought provoking. This could easily be the not so distant future...

Just read that Ron Howard already optioned this for the big screen-woohoo!

ARC provided by NetGalley

Summary: In the near future, global warming has turned much of the country into permanent desert conditions. Small towns are nearly abandoned and cities are hot and overcrowded. After the Black Friday Massacre, when thousands of people were shot while doing their holiday shopping, people are afraid to leave their homes for even routine errands. Most brick and mortar stores have gone out of business except for the very largest ones and a few determined mom-and-pop stores.

One man, Gibson Wells, is behind the solution. He created mega centers where people live and work. Deliveries to homes outside of Cloud are made with a well-designed drone system. When people work for MotherCloud aka Cloud, they have everything they need right on the climate controlled property, which is described as much like an oversized airport terminal.

As the story begins, Gibson Wells is dying from cancer. He is taking his last year to visit his MotherCloud centers and greet workers personally. He has yet to choose his successor.

At one of the centers, two new employees have different agendas. Paxton has an axe to grind with Gibson Wells. Paxton invented a device that cooked a perfect hard-boiled egg. Cloud purchased the product and then undercut the prices time after time, putting Paxton out of business. He wants to meet Gibson Wells and give him a piece of his mind. Zinnia is a corporate spy, sent to discover weaknesses and deceit in Cloud’s power systems.

Paxton and Zinna find themselves unexpectedly sucked into the Cloud mentality. It seems to not be quite as bad as they thought. But slowly, they discover things that put their very lives in danger.

Comments: This is a whiz-bang, first-rate page turner! I romped through it in a single day. The author has created a very believable world, in which things that actually exist today are just taken to the next horrific step. The characters are all very relatable and the alternating chapters in their voices gives the reader a well-rounded perspective.

A bit of an amusing personal aside on current delivery systems, I’m currently waiting for a package delivery. The package was apparently farmed out to an individual who does deliveries after work. The building I’m living in locks the doors at 5 pm. This package is going round and round trying to get here. I’ve tried to resolve this problem, but haven’t been able to yet. It definitely would be nice if a drone could drop it on my balcony!

Very highly recommended for readers of General Fiction, Science Fiction, Apocolyptic and Dystopian Fiction, and Contemporary Fiction. It would also make a great Beach or Travel read and I’d love to see it hit the best-seller lists.

Director Ron Howard’s Imagine Entertainment has already opted to adapt The Warehouse into a movie. I don’t watch many movies, but I’m already looking forward to this one!

Big Brother is always watching you. Cloud does it by way of the watches. You are worked to the bone and if you step out of line, you are ejected from Cloud with no hope for the future. Gibson is reminiscent of Trump, arrogantly defending his decisions regardless of who it hurts. Not only has he driven every competitor out of business, but he also controls the government. The sky becomes black with drones the closer you get to any Cloud city. Gibson is out of touch with the reality of how his wonderfully innovative ideas affect the everyday person. The future hasn’t gotten rid of racism, sexism, and ageism. Zinnia is almost raped her first week while trying to take a shower.

Paxton is determined to be there for a few months so he can get back on his feet. He has this wild hope of meeting Gibson, shaking his hand and telling him all the ways he ruined his life. But he is quickly seduced by the Cloud life. He falls for Zinnia and he begins to think that it might be a nice life after all, to have Cloud looking after all of his needs. There is an exciting suspenseful storyline for each of the three characters and I was quickly caught up in the story.

As I said, with any good dystopian novel there are so many similarities to what is going on in our world today and the choices that we are making that you can visualize how easy it would be to end up with that for our future. I loved this story so much and found that it moved at a face pace, I felt for all the characters and was caught up in this world. It reads more like a mystery for those who aren’t keen on science fiction. It’s smart, juicy and a great book club book because it is rich with things to discuss. This is one of my favorite novels this year and definitely on my must-read list.

A quick read about corporate life in American gone ballistic, as an Amazon-ified company takes over a dystopian future and provides a Big Brother-ish work-life home for its desperate employees.

Books like The Warehouse make me slightly uncomfortable and this book took me about half way through to really start to like it.

"The Cloud," is your home, your job, your gym, your everything. Sounds great doesn't it? Employees have more time to spend with their family when they would normally be commuting. But what happens when "The Cloud" has some shady things going on behind the scenes. Zinnia is here to find out, hired to crack whatever is going on here.

Paxton however already hates this place, the place that stopped his small business from running. He meets Zinnia the first day and hopes to make a friendship out of it. Though when he is given the one job he did not want he doesn't know if he can stick it out any longer. Then he is given an assignment: find the suppliers to the drug that is taking over the place.

Will Zinnia be able to use Paxton's job to help her achieve her goal or will she end up befriending this nerdy guy?

Thank you to NetGalley, Crown Publishing and author Rob Hart for this ARC!

A thinly, really thinly, veiled stab at Amazon is located in The Warehouse.

The Black Friday Massacres drive people to shop increasingly online. The Cloud (ahem, Amazon) picks up the slack and becomes the world’s biggest employer. It opens modern factory towns, called MotherClouds, worldwide where workers use their money to pay for rent and food.

In the distribution centers, drones make deliveries easy. However, automated watches and shelves make the pickers’ jobs untenable and injuries common. Enter industrial spy, Zinnia, who is trying to determine if the Cloud is faking its “fully green” environmental policy to grab valuable government incentives.

I have a nephew and a niece who used to work as pickers at Amazon. They had talked about the inability to reach the bathrooms during breaks and the hectic work schedule required to avoid getting fired (though both eventually were let go). In addition, my job went on a tour of the Amazon warehouse in town. I’m part of the County’s Purchasing Department but it appears anyone can request a tour. I have seen all of the moving shelves (currently just on wheels—not automated bugs like in the book but I’m sure someone is testing the bugs at some other Amazon warehouse). I have seen the frantic pace of the pickers and boxers.

Maybe it is because I knew too much about Amazon, but I didn’t like The Warehouse. There wasn’t much new to me and I think the author could have pushed it to a more absurd level. This book felt like it was projecting only about a year into the real Amazon’s future. I had some high hopes but this was a miss for me. However, I am still giving it 3 stars because the writing was good and the characters seemed genuine.

Thanks to Crown Publishing and NetGalley for a copy in exchange for my honest review.

In the future, Cloud is the biggest tech company around. No one has to leave their house ever again to get quite literally anything and everything they need, a choice most people take after the cryptically referred to "Black Friday Massacres".

Outside Cloud's facilities, the world isn't doing so well. Inside Cloud's facilities, people like Paxton and Zinnia find jobs, air conditioning, beds, and clean water- a situation most people would give anything for. But Paxton and Zinnia had different intentions when they arrived, intentions that may change as they take in the truth of the world they are now a part of.

This is a chillingly contemporary read. It feels like Hart's prophecy of the future. There are so many little details that just raised the goosebumps on my arms.

The characters are written well, and I really liked how they developed throughout the story, sometimes taking a far left turn from where I thought they were going. There are a lot of twists that really surprised me.

I wish the twists had been spread out a little bit more. The ending felt a little rushed because so much was going on at one time.

Hart has created a terrifyingly timely read. At times it felt like reading a really subtle horror story. I can absolutely see this book becoming a popular one.

The Warehouse is a thought provoking dystopian type thriller set in what one could imagine a near future. A parody of a well known online retailer this book features The Cloud as an online one stop retail shop where employees actually live where they work. Employees receive star ratings for their performance - I suppose that's like a product review. I don't really find this a thriller in the sense of the thrillers like I normally read - maybe more of a technothriller. It's not particularly fast moving book - its written at just a steady pace and is quite intriguing. I appreciate being given the opportunity to read and review this book - I don't know that I would have picked it up otherwise and I did enjoy it overall.

A thrilling story and one of my favorite books of the year. A scary look at what the future could hold with a competitor-less ‘Amazon’ like mega company named Cloud. Optioned for a film by Ron Howard, this will be a must see! Rob Hart’s vivid imagination and creative writing jumps off the page and he creates a world that is unnerving and downright scary. He shows how a global network’s commitment to operational excellence could derail and its’ workers livelihoods under ‘Big Brother’ can be compromised.

Gibson, the genius behind the corporate behemoth is an interesting presence who comes in and out of the story. His rambling messages is an interesting angle, mystifying and egotistical. Is he off his rocker or is he extraordinarily brilliant? Something was up but I couldn’t put my finger on it until the big reveal when everything comes together.


*will post on additional online venues shortly. Great story!

Before I get up on my soapbox with my feelings about this book let me say, read this book, it’s not as heavy as I’ve made it out to be. It’s exceedingly readable, quick and absorbing. It’s excellent.

We are going to start this review at the end of the book. Not the end of the story … don’t worry, this is a spoiler free review. I mean we will start in the acknowledgements. I do love acknowledgements in a book, because sometimes you can glean a lot of information in what the author chooses to share. In this case, the author explains his choice of dedication to a “Maria Fernandez”. Maria Fernandez, was a woman who, in 2014, worked 3 part-time jobs at Dunkin’ Donuts trying to make ends meet. She would sleep in her car between shifts and one morning accidentally died from suffocation on gas fumes. She made so little from her 3 jobs, she struggled to make her expenses including $550/month rent on a small apartment. As Mr. Hart notes, that year “Dunkin’ Brands chief executive Nigel Travis earned $10.2 million.” This tragic story was part of his inspiration for this book.

The Warehouse is dystopia cleverly disguised as a utopia. Who doesn’t want to work for a company like The Cloud (a thinly disguised Amazon)? You get a nice, though tiny apartment, are close to work, shopping, restaurants. It’s a safe place to work and raise a family. Of course, employees are also overworked, exposed to workplace hazards, micromanaged, surveilled within an inch of their lives, and exist in constant dread of their employment being terminated. But … the devil you know, right? The Cloud has nearly completely taken over distribution of goods worldwide. It controls legislation in multiple countries. Where else can you go if you can’t make it at The Cloud? You starve or you work for them.

The main story follows two new employees and their very different reasons for applying for work in The Cloud. I have to admit that the descriptions of the company itself were most interesting to me. How does it maintain its stranglehold over competition, how does it exert so much control over its employees. I found echoes of the dilema of the Joad’s in The Grapes of Wrath. On finally reaching the paradise of the fields in California, they soon learned that their meager wages would just as quickly be sucked up by obligations to the company for their living space and for goods bought at the Company Store. It’s a vicious cycle, that I believe, can be found in today at any local Walmart. Employees are hired at a pittance, trained to apply for state aid and encouraged to then spend those dollars in the stores they work at. Walmart gets cheap, cheap labor, offsets the cost to Federal aid programs, and then reaps the benefits that their underpaid workers receive. But hey, Walmart makes bucks, and we get to buy really cheap stuff. Win … win … right?

All that to say, The Warehouse is a fiction in the style of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam series. Just close enough to real life as to be completely believable, and a harbinger of coming attractions if nothing is done to protect workers like Maria Fernandez, like all of us. It’s an unflinching look at the results of the corporatization of the world, and a kick in the behind motivating us to do something about it. Ok, off the soapbox for today.

Bonus link: For a Worker with Little Time Between 3 Jobs, a Nap has Fatal Consequences – New York Times

Song for this book: Pa’ alante – Hurray for the Riff Raff

A dystopian tale that seems all too plausible, well mostly. As society crumbles with climate change and governments failure to do much, one company steps in and solves all of our shopping needs. After a deadly Black Friday massacre people just don't want to go into stores anymore. So now there is Cloud and nearly the only place to work. It reminded me a little of the movie Idiocracy, with the huge warehouse that everyone shops. As a worker you also must live there. It's a self-contained company store, with entertainment and everything. It's a bit creepy. The watch that tracks your movements and tells you were to go next when to wake up for your next shift.

The pacing of the book was great. There are a few aspects to the story-line that was kinda weird, seemed unnecessary. Some parts maybe not explored well or overdone, otherwise a decent book. It looks like we may see the book on the big-screen sometime. I'll definitely see the movie if that happens.