"The Silence" by Tim Lebbon is the sort of novel I've always loved, the idea of our world as we know it being disrupted by something we have absolutely no control of (like COVID for example).
The aggressors in this case are a strange race of creatures collectively known as "Vesps" (even with their own Hashtag - #VespUK), released unwittingly by an underground exploration team in a vast ancient cave system where they've existed in their own ecosystem for millions of years, evolving into voracious flying hunters who do not consider humanity to be top of the evolutionary ladder (or indeed any kind of a threat).
The novel unfolds from two perspectives - a deaf girl whose family makes a desperate escape to a highland refuge, and a father who will do absolutely anything to protect his family from danger.
As the Vesps are extremely sensitive to noise, the girl's world of silence becomes an asset as the family must learn to move, communicate and exist in complete silence (anyone who has seen the movie "The Quiet Place" will feel on familiar ground as some of the set pieces in the novel eerily echo scenes in the movie).
It takes a while to get going, from the initial scenes of chaos as the Vesps first sweep across Eastern Europe, but there are tense moments as our island nation waits for the inevitable, the creatures breaching our natural 'moat' of the English Channel before moving further inland. All the while the story focuses on how the family begins to break away from the 'norm' and being upstanding law-abiding citizens, into something more like a scrabble for survival (it was quite eerie to read scenes of widespread panic buying branching out into looting but Tim neglected to predict the furore over bog roll!)
Then like the Vesps themselves, the novel begins to bite down hard, ramping up the tension and the family's plight becomes ever-more grim. There are times where you feel that Tim was waiting for the turning point in the novel before he began to become properly immersed in conveying the core horror of what happens to an ordinary family in situations where the authorities are powerless.
It's interesting how the characters have to strike a severe balance between selfless and selfish acts as the world goes to hell, and without giving away the end, it paints a picture of humanity that we see currently in our everyday lives. There are those that care, that tow the line, that do what is necessary - and there are those who do not / will not, expecting others to pick up the pace on their behalf.
I rather enjoyed this one, though the initial pace will probably put some readers off, once it gets into its stride it feels grimly Wyndham-esque (in a good way), making you muse over what you'd do yourself in a situation like this (well, look back over the last couple of years for an answer I guess. COVID might not have wings and be capable of ripping your body in two, but it's no less a global threat than the Vesps in this novel).
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