Silent Night

Like the author, one of my very favourite books as a teenager was The Day of the Triffids and this tense and atmospheric thriller captures perfectly the creeping sense of dread and the terrifying contrast between everyday normality and what was happening to the protagonists, that made that classic so memorable. The protagonists we have here are eminently relatable and authentic as we meet them, newly arrived at their holiday let in a remote village in Wales for the extended family Christmas gathering. With not enough room for everyone in the cottage, thirteen-year-old Masen, his younger brother Joss and wannabe cool older cousin Conor, spend the night in the caravan parked on the drive. When they rush into the cottage the next morning, keen to get opening presents, everyone else has disappeared and the peculiar fungoid mini-Christmas trees, which were all over the house, are now black and stinking. A further complication is Storm Elena, which means that the children are cut off from the outside world (trees block the roads in and out of the village, the power is out and the phone masts are down). They head into the village only to discover similarly empty houses and then they begin to meet zombie -like adults. Silent, with strange orange and pink eyes, they’re blindly marching south, stepping over everything in their path, tragically including cliffs, to reach the coast. The plot thickens when they meet the enigmatic Gloria, who claims her father is working on a cure for the Infected and meanwhile, they will be safe with him. He is offering all the abandoned children sanctuary, but Masen begins to suspect that all is not what it seems in the luxurious set-up. Masen is a brilliantly drawn complex teenager with anxiety issues and a tendency to over think, but resilient, brave and caring. The thoughtful themes around families and emotions, including grief, and how they are all an important part of human experience, really lift this novel above its spooky thriller genre and although it is a story set around Christmas , this is  definitely a  book with a shelf life far beyond the festive season and precisely the  sort of unputdownable page turner to fill those long dark winter evenings!