The Silence
Tim Lebbon
Titan Books
April 2015
Reviewed by Martel Sardina
The things we see and the people we interact with on a daily basis shape our view of the world. Most of us probably spend more time thinking about things like upcoming sporting events, traffic congestion, and the weather than we do about what is going on under the Earth. We don’t think about what dangers could be lurking below our feet. Out of sight, out of mind as the old saying goes.
Tim Lebbon forces readers to think about that hidden world below in his upcoming novel, The Silence. An expedition into a previously undiscovered cave system in Moldova results in the disturbance of creatures that no one had expected to find. As the results of the expedition are broadcast on live television, Ally, a deaf teenager who hopes to one day become a journalist, begins an online scrapbook to chronicle the unfolding events. Ally alerts her family to the breaking news, though other media outlets are quick to dismiss the reports of monsters unleashed from the cave as some kind of publicity stunt. No one wants to believe that what they are seeing could possibly be real.
The invasion of the vesps begins. Ally continues to monitor their progression from the cave across Europe as they head toward the UK, noticing that the creatures detect prey based on sound. Absolute silence, something that Ally has learned to cope with since the accident that caused her hearing loss, may be the key to surviving in a vesp infested world. The degradation of modern society as the swarm moves on is reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Fans of environmental horror such as Stephen King’s The Mist and creature feature horror flicks will no doubt love the end of the world as we knew it and the beginning of Tim Lebbon’s new one.
