What is the overall mood created by the setting?

The Lorax opens in a clearly dystopic future. Indeed, Dr. Seuss's talent for vivid, fantastical imagery is on full display from the first page onwards. The invented "Grickle-grass," for example, employs alliteration and onomatopoeia to conjure the image of dense, scraggly, unappealing shrubs. The opening sentence, as well, employs the evocative phrase, "at the far end of town," immediately casting a decisively ominous tone over the story.