Three hours later he arrived at the back of the queue and took up a new place at the very end. Once there, he cast a long look at the Gate. From afar, it looked like a solid wall, and he wondered in despair whether it would ever open.

Perhaps even more so than its spiritual predecessors / companions in the genre, I was struck by how strongly the absurdity of The Queue's authoritarian regime is matched by its disturbing sense of realism and the feeling that this could happen all too easily in our own world.