This time around, the danger comes from inside the earth. When a cave system is opened for the first time in centuries, creatures escape to wreak havoc on the world. they kill their victims and lay eggs in the corpses, spreading exponentially across the planet. Being completely blind, they hunt through sound, the only way to avoid them is silence.
This sounds similar to a particular movie currently on its threequel (prequel) but predates the first film in the franchise by a good few years so all similarities can be safely ignored.
Also, these flying creatures, known as Vesps, are small, the size of cats and overpower their prey through weight of numbers, rather than giant things that fly off with their victims.
Our lead characters are a very normal family with a deaf daughter, teenaged Ally (although she's annoyingly called Ali on the back cover- I wish blurb writers would get the details correct). 10 year old Jude, and the parents Huw and Kelly.
When they see the stories about the spreading swarm on the news, they decide to take the dog and run from the city to an old family home in Scotland. Of course, things are not going to go easily for them.
The vesps are certainly the stuff of absolute nightmare. Once they reach mainland Britain, the tension raises and never drops.
I really like that the book just follows a completely normal family. There's no scientist or soldier to work out the cure and to save the world. These are regular Joes in an extreme situation, just trying to survive. They follow what's happening in the world through increasingly unreliable social media for as long as Ally can keep her iPad charged. Every chapter opens with a quote from someone online, on twitter or Facebook etc, with an increasingly hopeless viewpoint.
The family are easily relatable and their relationships are completely believable. These are people we want to see get through this somehow. Lebbon has created a great central cast of characters. I hope that there is a follow up because I need to know what happened next.
This is my second Tim Lebbon book and I'm kicking myself that I haven't read him earlier, because now I've got a lot of catching up to do.
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