The Uninvited

"A seven-year-old girl puts a nail gun to her grandmother's neck and fires"

As the father of a seven year old girl, that one sentence convinced me that I had to read the Uninvited! Liz Jensen's Uninvited lives up well to that hook.

When the book opens, we're introduced to Hesketh Lock, an anthropologist who works for a private organisation as an investigator looking at cases where corporate misdemeanours and sabotage are brought out into the open by anonymous whistle-blowers. Hesketh, as an Aspergers sufferer interested in the field of group dynamics is sent to Taiwan to investigate such a case and ends up making friends with a whistleblower who takes his own life following the admission that he believes that he is being haunted by evil spirits in child-like form. Immediately following this Hesketh travels to Sweden for another case and witnesses a corporate suicide but sees what he believes is a small girl seconds before the suicidee leaps to his death. But despite admitting privately that they saw something, other workers in the area refuse to openly declare the fact that a child was there.

All this time other incidents of extreme violence involving children are going on all over the world in increasing numbers. What follows through the book is how Hesketh identifies what may be a pattern of behaviour and how he deals with it – especially when his 7 year old son, who he dearly loves, commits a violent act – No spoilers, but the timing & ferocity of that particular incident took me by surprise.

Much of the violence on the worldwide scale happens off-camera and Jensen concentrates on the developing crisis as it unfolds in respect to Hesketh, his friends and family. Society gradually succumbs to the crisis with parents unable to trust their own children, leading to special centres being set up to house the children who appear to be evolving into a radically different form of humanity.

It's never specifically cleared up whether that is the case or not, or what the actual cause of this is- the fact that there is a huge number of cases where childlike supernatural beings appear suggests a supernatural cause, but Hesketh believes that there is a legitimate (albeit far-fetched) scientific cause to the changes.

Making an Aspergers sufferer the focus of the book is an interesting move and lets Liz Jensen build the scenario in a logical manner. Not every situation is immediately explained- We're told early on that a particular female co-worker being involved in the cases upsets Hesketh but it's only gradually revealed why. Hesketh himself veers between being a likable character, and at times a self-centred near bully but his love for his son Freddie is clear even after the violent incident alluded to above.

As a whole, the Uninvited is an interesting mix of possible influences. When I originally read the premise, I was struck by the thematic similarity with the novella Running Wild by J.G. Ballard (one of my favourite things written by Ballard but very little known in comparison to much of his work), and the whole scenario also reminds me of a hybrid between the cozy catastrophes of John Wyndham (the Chrysalids could be a thematic predecessor to the Uninvited) and Ballard's disaster novels, with a side order of The Stand thrown in for good measure. When I was thinking through this review I was also suddenly struck by the possibility that Hesketh's former Professor was also an analogue for Professor Quatermass.

The Uninvited is well written - Jensen has an easy style of writing which draws you in – she reveals things gradually and occasionally flips your expectations as to where the book is going. There's extreme horror, physical and psychological in nature but there are sections of surprising tenderness. It also features a lot of origami! By the close of the book, with world civilisation on its knees Hesketh has retreated to an isolated area where groups of near-feral children including his son roam free. You're left with the feeling that in his mind Hesketh has not only survived but flourished. It's as close to a happy ending as anyone could reasonably expect under the circumstances.