The action takes place inside a huge silo, 144 stories deep, dug into the Earth, where people must live because the atmosphere is toxic and the land is ruined. By now, if you haven’t read (or at least heard of) “Wool,” you’re hopelessly old-fashioned and oddly well-suited to its rather traditional storytelling charms. Simon and Schuster caught the wave and is publishing a five-volume omnibus - in simultaneous hardcover and paperback editions - for us Luddites. It seems as if there should be a marketing trick responsible or some blatant appeal to prurient interest, but this is no “Fifty Shades of Wool.” It’s the real deal. But what sets it apart from hundreds of thousands of self-published e-books is that it’s a good and compelling story, and well told.

Well before any print edition rolled off a press, “Wool” had sold more than 400,000 e-books and was optioned by Hollywood. Rapidly rising sales led him to continue the story in four additional installments. It was discovered by fans of dystopian sci-fi adventure, and they quickly spread the word. In the summer of 2011, a 36-year-old jack-of-all-trades named Hugh Howey self-published a short story on the Web. They are given the very thing they profess to want: They are allowed outside.Even if it were just a run-of-the-mill post-apocalyptic novel about a society forced to live underground, “ Wool” would still be quite a tale. These are the dangerous people, the residents who infect others with their optimism. But there are always those who hope, who dream. The world outside has grown unkind, the view of it limited, talk of it forbidden.

This is the story of mankind clawing for survival, of mankind on the edge. Your demand created this as much as I did. My thanks go out to those reviewers who clamored for more. Due to reviewer demand, the rest of the story was released over the next six months. The first Wool story was released as a standalone short in July of 2011. It is for those who arrived late to the party and who wish to save a dollar or two while picking up the same stories in a single package.

This Omnibus Edition collects the five Wool books into a single volume.

The wool omnibus