Six years after nuclear war turned the surface into irradiated wasteland, what remains of humanity exists underground in a place called Haven. The tunnels are dim. Time is tracked not by sunlight but by bells and buzzes. Religion has largely given up alongside everything else.
This is the world Ariel Sullivan constructs in Beneath by Ariel Sullivan — not as backdrop but as pressure. It presses down on every character, every decision, every carefully managed calorie. Haven operates through five sectors, each assigned a color-coded identification band: dark blue for the Force, white for the Hospital Ward, green for the Kitchens, black for Sanitation, gray for Expansion. Health scores determine who receives medical care and who is quietly abandoned. It is a grim, efficient system, and Sullivan renders it with the specificity of someone who has thought hard about how people actually behave when survival becomes arithmetic.
Readers who came through Conform — the first published book in Sullivan’s series, set chronologically after these events and released in 2025 — will recognize the earliest, darkest seeds of the Illum order taking shape. Newcomers will find Beneath fully immersive on its own terms.
Sasha Cadell: Death’s Angel, Reluctant
Sasha is twenty-three and done. Done with the Hospital Ward, where she worked for years sitting beside patients the doctors had already written off. Done with the nickname — Death’s Angel — that followed her because she could sit with dying strangers without flinching and without catching whatever claimed them. Now she swings a pickax in Expansion, strikes dirt until the rest of the world quiets, and calls it a wonderful, monotonous existence.
She is lying to herself. Sullivan lets us know this immediately and then spends the entire novel carefully unpacking why.
What elevates Beneath by Ariel Sullivan above the average dystopian entry is its commitment to Sasha as a psychological portrait rather than a genre vehicle. Her damage is layered and internally consistent. The walls she has built — around grief, around maternal abandonment, around survivor’s guilt — are not plot obstacles. They are the plot. Watching Sasha resist, deflect, self-sabotage, and occasionally, with enormous effort, let someone in is the emotional architecture the novel rests on. Her arc moves slowly and realistically. That is precisely why it lands.
Tristian Hayes and the Long Road to Trust
Unit Commander Tristian Hayes has been trying to recruit Sasha for months before the story begins. He is persistent. He is also genuinely decent — loyal to his unit in ways that border on obsessive, honest to the point of disarming, and possessed of a life force that feels almost transgressive in an underground world built on attrition.
The slow burn between Sasha and Tristian is Beneath by Ariel Sullivan at its most compelling. Sullivan doesn’t rush it and doesn’t dramatize it artificially. Their tension builds through small moments — a nutrient paste offered during lockdown, a rifle correction in a dim training room, a hand that lingers. The restraint is intentional and effective. Readers who need their romance fast-moving should prepare: this is warmth earned one degree at a time.
Found Family at the End of the World
Unit Seven — Levi, Rumi, Patrick, Ingrid, Isla, and Damien — is one of the novel’s most quietly accomplished elements. Each member carries their own history, their own grief, their own loyalty. Sullivan avoids making them feel like orbit-characters. They argue, protect, defer, and push back. Their bond, and how it’s tested in the novel’s second half, gives the stakes personal weight.
Key pleasures of Unit Seven:
Levi’s steadiness as Sasha’s assigned partner — patient, perceptive, and unflinching
Rumi’s sharp intelligence, always several moves ahead of everyone else
Patrick’s faith, worn openly, functioning as both anchor and counterweight
Damien’s sardonic humor masking something the others quietly guard
Ingrid’s grief — raw and unresolved — creating necessary friction throughout
These are not characters. They are people who happen to be in a novel, and the difference matters enormously.
What Doesn’t Quite Surface
Sullivan’s novel earns its praise cleanly. A few caveats remain.
Pacing. The middle section — covering training sequences and political maneuvering within the Force — loses momentum in places. Sullivan is building slowly, deliberately, and the emotional payoff ultimately justifies the patience required. But some scenes hold their rhythm a beat too long before things accelerate again.
The Jaxon complication. Sasha’s history-adjacent entanglement introduces friction without adequate resolution within this book. His presence serves the larger architecture of the series, but his specific arc here reads more like setup than payoff.
The prequel paradox. Readers arriving from Conform face a mild structural challenge: some revelations carry less weight when you already know the general shape of what follows. This is a consequence of Sullivan’s unconventional “dueling trilogy” approach, not a failure of craft. But it affects the texture of discovery.
The ending. This book closes in the middle of something — deliberately, with real skill behind the placement. Readers who need closure should know that Core, Book 2 in the Conform series, is where that arrives.
The Prose, the Grief, and the Thing Beneath
Sullivan writes interiority the way Sasha swings her pickax — controlled repetition that accumulates weight. Sentences are often short, punchy, declarative. Emotional passages stretch longer, unspooling against the brevity like something finally breaking. The style is calibrated to its subject: a woman at war with herself, in a world at war with everyone.
Beneath by Ariel Sullivan engages openly with depression and grief — not as metaphor but as lived condition, present in every chapter. This is handled with genuine care and, from the author’s own acknowledgments, deep personal investment. It lifts the book well clear of standard genre territory and into something more lasting.
About the Conform Series
Beneath is Book 0. Conform (2025) is Book 1, set chronologically after these events but published first — a structurally bold choice that rewards readers willing to follow the author’s intent. Core is forthcoming as Book 2.
Read These Next
If Beneath by Ariel Sullivan resonates, these titles occupy similar emotional and genre territory:
Red Rising by Pierce Brown — underground resistance, hierarchical brutality, slow-earned trust
An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir — military training, moral ambiguity, devastating romance
Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi — interior narration, a damaged woman learning her own worth
Legend by Marie Lu — dystopian survival, restrained romance, propulsive pacing
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins — societal control, survival stakes, a woman who carries everything
A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas — slow burn done right, emotionally complex leads
Beneath asks what survival costs a person — and whether what remains is still worth living for. Sullivan’s answer arrives slowly, painfully, and with more tenderness than the world it inhabits deserves.