The Uninvited

Nov 06, 2012 karen rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: creepy-children, netgalley, tastes-like-people, distant-lands

liz. jensen.

so super-psyched that i was able to get a netgalley pre-u.s release of this book. not that many of you care, because so few people read liz jensen. which is, i think, the cause of most of the world's ills. floundering economy? probably because not enough people are reading liz jensen. hurricane sandy?? happened 'cuz not enough people have read liz jensen. rihanna and katy perry are fighting?? all of this could have been avoided by just one or two more of you reading some liz jensen....more
liz. jensen.

so super-psyched that i was able to get a netgalley pre-u.s release of this book. not that many of you care, because so few people read liz jensen. which is, i think, the cause of most of the world's ills. floundering economy? probably because not enough people are reading liz jensen. hurricane sandy?? happened 'cuz not enough people have read liz jensen. rihanna and katy perry are fighting?? all of this could have been avoided by just one or two more of you reading some liz jensen. so get out there and take back the world. go ahead and start with this book, because it is pretty sweet.

and i mean "sweet" in the darkest and most horrifying definition of the word. this book centers around hesketh lock, whose asperger's syndrome prevents him from making emotional attachments to the people in his life, but makes him very good at his job as an anthropologist, employed to discover patterns of behavior across populations.

'When it comes to gauging human behaviour, it's an asset. It's like colour-blind people being deployed by the military to detect camouflage,'I reply. 'They look for the shapes rather than the colours.'

and he is very good at pattern-recognition. also numbers, colors, and origami. less-good at remembering the faces of women with whom he has had sex, but what does that get you, at the end of the day?

the world is in need of a hesketh to make sense of some disturbing recurring instances of extreme violence: children all over the world are lashing out at their family members, attacking and killing them with no memory of their actions afterward, and unwilling to discuss or even acknowledge the events. concurrently, acts of corporate sabotage are occurring across the globe, whose perpetrators claim to have seen strange things, and shortly thereafter, commit suicide.

how are these phenomena connected? can hasketh, the "robot made of meat" get to the bottom of it with venn diagrams and ozuru?? sure he can, but sometimes the answers are more horrifying than anyone could have anticipated.

this is an incredibly satisfying book, emotionally, intellectually, and philosophically.it is liz jensen at her finest, and i think i am going to go ahead and up this to the full five stars. why not?

i am encouraging you to read this.
heed me, please.

there is a little problem with the netgalley edition, though, one in which every word that uses the letter-combinations "ff", "fi", or "fl" will just have those letters omitted completely, so it was a little annoying, but you would be surprised at how quickly your reader-eyes adjust to it. and also surprising how many words use these letter combinations. eye-opening all around.(less)

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May 01, 2013 Trudi rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: judge-a-book-by-its-cover, science-fiction, what-the-bleep, fantastical-speculative, 2013-reads

I'm going to tell you two things that made me want to read this book:

1) The cover - I mean, c'mon...how kick-ass creepy is this?

2) The first sentence of the book jacket description: "A seven-year-old girl puts a nail gun to her grandmother's neck and fires."

Creepy, evil kids doing creepy evil things is usually a win for me. So it was a foregone conclusion that I would dive into this book with abandon.

First of all -- it isn't horror, despite the cover and the book jacket description. It's more a...more

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Dec 13, 2012 Simon rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

[I received this book as an ARC through a Goodreads give-away.]

The narrator of this book, Hesketh Lock, has a PhD in Anthropology and now works as a special kind of trouble-shooter for the firm of Phipps and Wexman. What does this firm do? It’s never exactly clarified. As Hesketh says, it regularly treads “the space between sharp practice and corporate fraud. ‘After a catastrophic PR shock, our job is to ensure nothing like that ever happens again anywhere on your global team, because it won’t n...more [I received this book as an ARC through a Goodreads give-away.]

The narrator of this book, Hesketh Lock, has a PhD in Anthropology and now works as a special kind of trouble-shooter for the firm of Phipps and Wexman. What does this firm do? It’s never exactly clarified. As Hesketh says, it regularly treads “the space between sharp practice and corporate fraud. ‘After a catastrophic PR shock, our job is to ensure nothing like that ever happens again anywhere on your global team, because it won’t need to’.” They give companies ‘profile makeovers.’ So this firm is the kind of second-order enterprise so characteristic of today’s global capitalism. It doesn’t produce, or sell, or provide services to the public at large. It services companies that engage in those first-order activities. It’s the parasite that lives on the fleas that live on the dog. It is, in other words, the perfect synecdoche of what is identified in the novel as “the adult world.”

The book is about this adult world, and what it means for children and, by extension, future generations. And the book does not present a rosy assessment of its track-record in this respect.

The book opens with the identification of two trends. First, children begin to attack their adult care-givers and family members, for no apparent reason, and then, at least at first, lapse into dissociative states. Secondly, there are cases of industrial sabotage done by adults. Hesketh is assigned by his company to do some sorting out in these cases of “catastrophic PR shocks.” Gradually, inevitably, the phenomena spread and become inter-connected. Events ensue.

For some reason, there has been a rash, over the last fifteen years or so, of books with narrators who have some kind or other of mental illness. Hesketh, we learn early on, has Asperger’s Syndrome. I suppose it’s obvious what the appeal is to authors of such narrators. Any book with a narrator, especially those in which the narrator appears in the action of the book – hence those narrated in the first person – opens up to the author the space to create parallax. Unreliable narrators are just one point, perhaps the most easily recognized, in this space. Narrators with identifiable mental idiosyncrasies encompass a whole sub-space of it. The author can use what we know about these conditions, and what the narrators themselves choose to tell us about then, to effect. In Hesketh’s case, unlike the case of the autistic narrator of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, the result is not cute at all. Although we understand his limitations, he sometimes comes across as a bit of a bully, and, in his behavior to some of the women, as creepy and unpleasant. But most of all, he emphasizes, both as his own perception and as what others value in him, his ability to spot patterns, and not to be clouded by emotion and superstition. (The latter, at least, turns out to be a double-edged sword indeed.) So, on the one hand, his ineptness in the world of interpersonal relations renders him somewhat childlike; while on the other, his ruthless logicality has allied him with the impersonal forces of capitalism. He embodies in himself the predominant theme of the novel: the relation of adults to children, insofar as these represent the future.

There is an obvious comparison to be made between this book and Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child, though Jensen’s intent in her creation of monstrous children is a lot clearer than Lessing’s. (Lessing, on the other hand, wins for sheer creepiness.) I’m sure it also bears comparison with Ian McEwan’s very strange The Child in Time, but since I don’t remember McEwan’s book well enough, I must leave that unpursued.

Jensen is a great writer. Atmosphere, dialogue, pacing, all are superbly executed. I just wish she hadn’t misused “begging the question,” twice. And once each in the mouths of the two most erudite people in the book. Still, that is a small complaint to make about a wonderful book.
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May 14, 2013 Alisha rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: e-books-i-ve-read, dystopian-apocalyptic, read-2013, horror

When it comes to The Uninvited, I'm a little bit of two minds. On the one hand, it's a really unique and different premise from any other post-apocalyptic/dystopian novel I've read (and I've read my fair share) which made it cool. But on the other hand, it was so different from what I've read that it might have dampened my enjoyment of the book a little bit.

Here's the thing: most of the P.A./dystopian novels I've read are action-packed, if not in the first page, well then at least in the first c...more When it comes to The Uninvited, I'm a little bit of two minds. On the one hand, it's a really unique and different premise from any other post-apocalyptic/dystopian novel I've read (and I've read my fair share) which made it cool. But on the other hand, it was so different from what I've read that it might have dampened my enjoyment of the book a little bit.

Here's the thing: most of the P.A./dystopian novels I've read are action-packed, if not in the first page, well then at least in the first couple of chapters. The Uninvited doesn't start out that way...at all. It starts off slow and it continues to be slow for a big chunk of the novel. However, it has some short parts where it picks up and makes you (if you're me) feel bad if you decide not to finish it because you think it might get completely kick-ass in the last half of the book. And it did...sort of.

The Uninvited gets to that point where you can't put it down at about 70 percent into the novel, I believe. Yet, by that time the end is so near that I kept thinking that it couldn't possibly get wrapped up in any kind of satisfactory way. Compared to the leisure pace The Uninvited was at the beginning (and in some of the middle), the ending just seems rushed. I felt like it needed at least 50 more pages to be more coherent instead of jamming everything in a few chapters from the end.

Another thing that made me pause was that in The Uninvited, I didn't get a real sense of panic from people. Before the end, everyone was just really calm and matter-of-fact about what was going on, or at least those in Hesketh's circle were. There wasn't a real sense of dread, which is what intrigues me in most post-apocalyptic/dystopian novels. I get that Hesketh tends to be more level-headed and rarely shows his emotions, but since this book was lacking panic or any sense of urgency, I started to feel just as "meh" about what was happening.

Besides this, I did find The Uninvited to be an interesting take on the end of the world. The relationship between Hesketh and Freddy is pretty much the heart of the novel and added some warmth to the novel. I also found it fascinating how Hesketh's inner circle started talking about how once society classifies any sort of group as sub-human, it makes it easier for society to stamp them out particularly because the group wouldn't be labeled as human and wouldn't have the same rights. I never thought of that before.

So, overall, The Uninvited was a good read. It was a deeper type of dystopian novel and not as much fluff-filled the way some dystopian novels are. I don't regret reading it and enjoyed it, but still feel it was sort of rushed towards the end. (less)

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Apr 22, 2013 Terry Weyna rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The Uninvited opens with a scene of intense horror, as a young child slaughters her grandmother with a nail-gun to the neck. “No reason, no warning.” Everyone’s immediate reaction is that there has been a terrible accident, especially as the girl is found staring at the wall, as if in shock; but then she comes to herself, grabs the nail gun, and puts it to her father’s face and fires again. “One murder, one blinding. Two minutes. No accident.” The girl had just turned seven.

The narrator of the t...more The Uninvited opens with a scene of intense horror, as a young child slaughters her grandmother with a nail-gun to the neck. “No reason, no warning.” Everyone’s immediate reaction is that there has been a terrible accident, especially as the girl is found staring at the wall, as if in shock; but then she comes to herself, grabs the nail gun, and puts it to her father’s face and fires again. “One murder, one blinding. Two minutes. No accident.” The girl had just turned seven.

The narrator of the tale that begins with this incident is Hesketh, a man who lives in a stone cottage on the island of Arran in Scotland, an isolated place that suits a man who prefers solitude and has a job that doesn’t require him to appear at the Head Office with any great frequency. Hesketh is separated from Kaitlin, which necessarily separates him from her son, Freddy, who is the same age as the girl who shot her grandmother; Hesketh feels the loss of Freddy much more than he does the loss of Kaitlin. Hesketh uses his training in anthropology to find and celebrate whistleblowers in corporations. He does so at the behest of those corporations, who wish to manage the whistleblowers for their own advantage, to show that they are good corporate citizens and avoid bad publicity. It’s a little surprising that Hesketh is able to be so effective at his work, as he has Asperger’s Syndrome. As it applies to him, Asperger’s makes it difficult for him to understand how people will react emotionally to any given set of circumstances, because he does not experience most emotions as the bulk of humanity does.

But Hesketh is, in fact, good at his work, which has him traveling throughout the world. An assignment in Taiwan, at a timber factory, reveals a situation fully as strange as the child who killed her grandmother with a nail gun. Hesketh finds the whistleblower quickly, but the man behaves very oddly. It is plain that he loves the organization that employs him; his father, grandfather and uncles all worked there, and he believes it to be a good company. He also clearly finds whistleblowing to be shameful. Hesketh notes that his movements are “jerky and puppet-like,” and that he has a “hectic look.” It’s almost as if the man acted against his own conscience and his own will in doing as he did. But more mysteriously, the man points to evidence — genuine evidence, not something manufactured — that seems to indicate someone else, in fact, a child, was involved.

The mysteries compound from there, and Hesketh is right in the middle of them. All over the world, people are betraying corporations they love. All over the world, children are killing the adults who care for them. It seems that some sort of apocalypse is underway, but one never foreseen and with no discernible shape. Who or what is the uninvited? And what are they, or it, doing to the world? What is their purpose, their plan? And how do ordinary people figure it out, and what do they do about it?

The story is told entirely in the first person by Hesketh, which makes the narrative mostly seem cold, analytical, emotionless. Consequently, when Hesketh does show emotion, it is all the more powerful. He has an especially interesting voice; seeing through his eyes, watching his habits, his means of coping, is fascinating. His emotional distance makes him able to observe and relate what is happening around him as familiar institutions start to collapse. It’s a great use of character to make an unusual story even more unusual.

And the story is unusual, imaginative, excitingly different. I’ve read nothing like The Uninvited before. It is very different from the average horror or science fiction novel, imagining events that seem unimaginable in exquisite detail. Despite the veritable arms race among thriller writers to make their viewpoint characters in some way “other,” giving them a disease or disorder that sets them apart from the mass of humanity, Jensen’s novel is the most skillful use of such a technique I’ve seen. It is a bleak tale, telling of an end to the world that seems entirely meaningless, an end that humans are helpless to prevent at any level. Yet there is a beauty to it, too, and an odd note that perhaps what is happening is not an ending, but merely a change. This is not an easy novel, but it is eminently worthwhile.

Originally published at http://www.fantasyliterature.com/revi... 4.5 stars rounded up to 5.
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Mar 04, 2013 Alex McGilvery rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The protagonist of The Uninvited by Liz Jensen is Hesketh a man who lives with Aspergers and turns it to positive use as a consultant with an insurance company. It is his job to assess risk and find reasons for people’s behavior. Hesketh is sent to investigate a sabotage in Taiwan. The saboteur commits suicide, but the case is far from closed as other similar situations develop around the world. At the same time children start attacking their caregivers with lethal affect. Hesketh is challenged...more

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Feb 25, 2013 Robert Beveridge rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: amazon-vine, finished, owned-and-still-own

Liz Jensen, The Uninvited (Bloomsbury, 2013)

Full disclosure: this book was provided to me free of charge by Amazon Vine.

I had a very difficult time with the first few chapters of this book. Hesketh Lock's head is a very difficult place to be, especially if you think like him. Something to be wary of, though once you've got the rhythm of Hesketh's narration down, that becomes less of a problem in Jensen's absorbing, intricately-plotted, baffling mystery-sci-fi-horror tale...

at least, in the first...more Liz Jensen, The Uninvited (Bloomsbury, 2013)

Full disclosure: this book was provided to me free of charge by Amazon Vine.

I had a very difficult time with the first few chapters of this book. Hesketh Lock's head is a very difficult place to be, especially if you think like him. Something to be wary of, though once you've got the rhythm of Hesketh's narration down, that becomes less of a problem in Jensen's absorbing, intricately-plotted, baffling mystery-sci-fi-horror tale...

at least, in the first three-quarters or so of it. Liz Jensen hands us Lock, our narrator, an insurance investigator-cum-spin doctor with Asperger Syndrome; a man for whom logic is everything and clarity is supreme. At least, he wants to think so; as the book opens, on the other hand, we find Hesketh on the island of Arran, off the coast of Scotland, working on a very complex piece of origami while trying to sort out his feelings about the recent breakup of a three-year relationship and his continuing affection for the ex's son Freddy, a child from a previous relationship with whom Hesketh has a strong bond. All of this is setup, really, and the slow pace of that doesn't help much; things get better when we meet Ashok, Hesketh's manic boss, who sends Hesketh winging off to investigate a bit of what seems to be industrial sabotage in southeast Asia. The case is quickly resolved, and Hesketh actually comes to respect the saboteur. But soon after, Hesketh learns in quick succession that (a) the man committed suicide, (b) this may not have been an isolated incident (he is immediately sent to Sweden on another case, which has disturbing similarities), and (c) these cases may be related to a series of violent attacks by children on their family members that is also plaguing the planet. Hesketh, Ashok, and other investigators at their company race to find the answers before society spirals completely out of control, even bringing Hesketh's mentor, Professor Whybray, out of retirement to assist—but all of them have their own personal baggage to deal with, and some of that starts getting in the way...

I spent the first half of this book amazed at what Liz Jensen was creating. I had no idea where she was going with it all, and was fascinated with the possibilities. Then she dropped the first hint, and I found myself thinking, “please, don't turn this into a crappy predictable piece of [x] fiction.” It's to Jensen's credit that she kept me thinking that until pretty darn close to the final chapter of the book; it felt like she was headed that way, but she never really stepped foot over the line until she absolutely had to. Which does not change the fact that the book picks the easiest, most predictable, most tiring way of resolving all of those previously-interesting bits and tying them all together. Again to Jensen's credit, she doesn't tie everything up neatly, as well she shouldn't; I can't go into detail without being spoilery, but the simple fact is that, from Hesketh's perspective, there is no way for him to have gained all of the answers by book's end, and that's something too many authors would have failed to realize. In fact, and since I keep using the phrase “to Jensen's credit” this should be obvious, the book is impeccably-written, most of it is very well-plotted, the main characters are solid, and even when some of the others aren't, it's very tempting to paint this as the way Hesketh sees them rather than any defect in Jensen creating them (Kaitlin, his ex, for example; Hesketh describes in a place or two how he's basically written her off, and so seeing her as two-dimensional makes sense). All well and good...but I can't get past that overly-facile, annoying resolution. It goes along so well, and then falls off a cliff. And yet, I can't bring myself to ding the book for that as hard as I desperately want to because it teetered on that edge for so long without actually falling off. There is a lot to be said for this book. Prepare, however, for great disappointment. ** ½ (less)

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Feb 22, 2013 Shelley Fearn rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: mystery-suspense, dystopian

I had no idea what to expect when I picked up this book. As the fiction selector for the library, I knew that the reviews had been good but by the time I had the chance to go to the new book section of course I had forgotten anything I had known about it.

The prologue starts with a statement of mass hysteria outbreaks when a child in butterfly pajamas murders her grandmother with a nail gun. Quickly we're introduced to Hesketh Lock, a PhD in folklore, who works for a PR firm whose role it seems t...more

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Feb 07, 2013 Gayle rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

THE UNINVITED by Liz Jensen is difficult to put into a niche. It's a distopian and psychological thriller, involving all types of evil that people embrace in their religious and societal beliefs: restless spirits of ancestors, trolls, jinns.

Children are going seemingly mad and doing evil things. Adults are sabotaging their own projects. When they realize what they've done, they commit suicide. The suicides are taking place globally and before each occurs, the victim complains of one of the evil...more

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Feb 05, 2013 Nick Turner rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: close-relations, bad-trope, fictional-world, future, human-evolution, present, thriller

Chilling premonitions of brutal dystopia. Manifold influences from Cloud Atlas to 1Q84. A thrilling read. The Uninvited has its own distinctive voice. The first person narrative leaves space for the reader's interpretation. Extreme violence between children and adults may be disturbing to child and childcarer readers.

When writers attempt to convey the particularity of the life of an Asperger's syndrome character - in a sympathetic manner - often the results seem patronising. Maybe there are life...more

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Jan 31, 2013 Cathe Olson rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Children are suddenly murdering their loved ones and loyal employees are sabotaging their employers, and anthropologist Hesketh Lock has to try to figure out what is happening in this creepy pre-apocalyptic story.

I loved the premise for this book and Jensen is a talented writer, but I just could not buy into the main character and it really ruined the book for me. Hesketh has Asperger's Syndrome, which is why he is so good at figuring out patterns, but the book is narrated by him in present tens...more

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Jan 30, 2013 Melissa rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. In many ways this is a great book. Jensen has invented something so sinister that even as I was laughing at myself, I still had to sidle to bed after staying up way too late reading, hurrying to the bathroom in the dark so I could whirl around & make sure nothing was behind me. What exactly was I afraid of? Kids? Kids are short & they have small hands. The element of surprise is the only reason that you should be attacked by them, unless they're in a great big pack. I've only got the one...more In many ways this is a great book. Jensen has invented something so sinister that even as I was laughing at myself, I still had to sidle to bed after staying up way too late reading, hurrying to the bathroom in the dark so I could whirl around & make sure nothing was behind me. What exactly was I afraid of? Kids? Kids are short & they have small hands. The element of surprise is the only reason that you should be attacked by them, unless they're in a great big pack. I've only got the one in my house & he was in his crib the last time I'd seen him that night, so I was reasonably sure he wasn't behind me with a nail gun - but yet I was still so freaked out, I couldn't turn my back on the bedroom door as I fell asleep.

But in many ways this book just does not get it done. At the end of the day, there's just no capitalization on all the wonderful dread that’s created. The characters are so smart they figure out that all these murdering pre-teens & sabotaging adults are possessed by archetypal demon figures from specific cultures who are trying to destroy the world so it can be reborn someday (I think), but yet they’re so unforgivably stupid about other stuff. Most infuriatingly, Steph & Hesketh spend the afternoon listening to young Freddy veer in & out of a possessed state & tell them all about how "epic" it will be when all the adults have been killed, then they let his mom go upstairs to be alone with him. Even though children have been participating in this worldwide orgy of patricide, they just saunter off to the kitchen to get some wine & of course Freddy pushes his mom down the stairs. If this whole scenario is meant to imply mankind’s imminent decimation at the hands of said demons, how on earth is Hesketh still ordering seeds from a seed catalogue at the end of the book? Who the heck is filling his order? The urgency gets lost, Freddy runs off to live with the feral children on the island, and all the excellent spookiness sort of dwindles away to nothing. Hesketh smiles at the rain, the end.
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Jan 18, 2013 Candace rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I read the reviews of "The Uninvited" and somehow imagined that it was a police novel. Please don't ask how I came up with this idea, because there is no evidence in any review on this site that would give me this impression. But this is a good thing. If I had realized that this is a sci fi novel I very likely would not have read it which would have been too bad because this book is a fine, chilling, compelling read.

The main character, Hesketh Lock, has learned to use a number of mental exercise...more

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Jan 11, 2013 Suspense Magazine added it · review of another edition

A good story always has a protagonist riddled with faults, self-doubts, and obstacles. It makes for realistic reading and gives the character room for growth. But it’s a crazy brave author who imbues their lead character with Asperger’s Syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder causing sufferers to struggle with correct social interaction, repetitive behavior, and obsessive interests. Author Liz Jensen’s Asperger’s sufferer Hesketh Lock, is a world authority on anthropology, employed by large organi...more A good story always has a protagonist riddled with faults, self-doubts, and obstacles. It makes for realistic reading and gives the character room for growth. But it’s a crazy brave author who imbues their lead character with Asperger’s Syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder causing sufferers to struggle with correct social interaction, repetitive behavior, and obsessive interests. Author Liz Jensen’s Asperger’s sufferer Hesketh Lock, is a world authority on anthropology, employed by large organizations to analyze worker’s group behavior. His syndrome gives him the unique ability to unemotionally analyze patterns in behavior.

When seemingly loyal workers in organizations around the world suddenly wreak havoc through sabotage followed quickly by suicide, Hesketh is sent to Taiwan to investigate. He then finds himself traveling across the world as more workers damage companies in various ways, from computer espionage to setting explosions before dying.

Simultaneously, children around the world are suddenly and violently turning on their parents and grandparents, killing and maiming them. It begins with a seven-year-old girl who puts a nail-gun to her grandmother’s neck and fires. As the story progresses, Hesketh begins to wonder if his stepson Freddy, is also becoming part of the global epidemic of insanity.

This book is fascinating and a challenging read. Hesketh’s Asperger’s makes it very confusing in the first third due to his propensity to jump from one seemingly unrelated thought to the next. However, when your mind becomes accustomed to his disjointed voice, you begin to appreciate his compelling view of human nature and the world.

Jensen has written a character rarely encountered in fiction. Her eco-apocalyptic vision is refreshingly new and a departure from the usual mutated virus, zombie, or nuclear winter apocalypse. Enter the world of “The Uninvited” knowing it’s going to be a disjointed and slightly sluggish beginning. However, once all the scattered threads are drawn together, you will find the pace will barely allow you to catch your breath until the shocking revelations at the end. It is quite an experience that may have you exiting your children’s bedrooms for just a few days without turning your back.

Reviewed by Susan May http://anadventureinreading.blogspot.... for Suspense Magazine
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Jan 10, 2013 Leeswammes rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I loved this book! I loved the main character, 36 year old Hesketh, who has Asperger’s Syndrome and has his own way of dealing with people and situations. When it gets too much, he carries out his hobby, origami paper folding, in his head: he thinks through the steps of folding a swan in order to calm himself down and to shut himself off from his environment – what a fantastic idea!

He also creates flow charts in his head to work out the possible outcome of situations, which he uses during his in...more

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Jan 01, 2013 Tome rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The Uninvited is a dystopian novel set in the present day, where children start behaving oddly and attacking adults close to them. From a few isolated incidents, modern society soon reaches breaking point and a new equilibrium is reached.

The underlying message of The Uninvited - that our current society and population growth is unsustainable - is an interesting one, and is explored in a novel way. However, I felt the idea was not delved into as much it could have been, and I, as a fan of dystopi...more The Uninvited is a dystopian novel set in the present day, where children start behaving oddly and attacking adults close to them. From a few isolated incidents, modern society soon reaches breaking point and a new equilibrium is reached.

The underlying message of The Uninvited - that our current society and population growth is unsustainable - is an interesting one, and is explored in a novel way. However, I felt the idea was not delved into as much it could have been, and I, as a fan of dystopian fiction, was left wanting more. The start is absorbing but slow, with the rest of the novel feeling rushed which leads to very little attention being paid to the issues arising from the collapse of society. Instead the book jumps forward to a unsatisfying ending.

The novel itself is easy to read, with the characters, particularly Hesketh, making an emotional connection with the reader. The inner monologue from Hesketh, was particularly interesting in its portrayal of someone with Aspergers, and this aspect of his charactersation was particularly well done. The logical approach of Hesketh makes it easier to take in some of the more far-fetched aspects of the plot.

I enjoyed the book on the whole, and finished it in a few hours; the intrigue surrounding the source of the 'pandemic' carrying me onwards. The eventual explanation is somewhat unexpected although not all together convincing, which the author alludes to with a line "Let string theory work that out". One niggle with the ARC version was extremely poor formatting, with many missing letters and several misspellings This made reading it on my Kindle frustrating, and hopefully the retail version is better.

Overall the premise is a good one, with an intriguing take on the issue of overpopulation, however the author fails to take full advantage, and as such the novel is merely a good read - rather than something more outstanding or thought provoking.

The Uninvited is available from Amazon as an e-book for £7.40 or as a paperback for £5.99.

[An ARC was provided by NetGalley](less)

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Dec 30, 2012 Esther Shaindel rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Full review on Reader's Dialogue: http://readersdialogue.blogspot.com/2...

The Uninvited is like an environmentalist, anti-capitalist - and much more violent - Childhood's End. Arthur C. Clarke leaves many things unanswered in Childhood's End - all the whys and what for's - and I feel like The Uninvited is (intentionally or not) a sort of response to that. The group-think of the children is what led me to this train of thought at first, but as the narrative moves on, the motives and results of th...more Full review on Reader's Dialogue: http://readersdialogue.blogspot.com/2...

The Uninvited is like an environmentalist, anti-capitalist - and much more violent - Childhood's End. Arthur C. Clarke leaves many things unanswered in Childhood's End - all the whys and what for's - and I feel like The Uninvited is (intentionally or not) a sort of response to that. The group-think of the children is what led me to this train of thought at first, but as the narrative moves on, the motives and results of the children's actions faintly echo how Clarke told his story.

Of course, the way the story is told is affected by Hesketh's Asperger's. The choice of making Hesketh have Asperger's is brilliant in so many ways. First of all, it provides a detached narrator, someone who can relay events in a logical way without having it tinged by his emotional attachment. That of course disappears about halfway through the novel, which makes the effects even stronger. When an outsider like Hesketh begins to feel personally involved, you know there's something really terrifying going on.

Besides that, Hesketh's voice adds a chilling quality to the story. Having all these crazy things going on, but told in such a matter-of-fact, plodding sort of way - it takes you a step back from the events and forces you to expend energy to think about what's going on and what it all means for the way the adults have to deal with it - and that means that as a reader, you're much more involved and definitely more affected by the shocking turns of events. And then when Hesketh's survival method of origami-making in his mind escalates and escalates, becomes more frenzied and more common, it heightens the eeriness of it all.

I loved watching Hesketh grapple with his innate logical and reasoning skills when presented with things that just don't fit. I loved seeing him fight and fight against admitting that "supernatural" things could be happening. And I also loved trying to stay a step ahead of him and figure out what was really going on. I didn't. But I tried! When he finally comes to terms with it all, when he finally figures out the real truth, I love the way he reacts. It emphasizes the futility of fighting back, the way he accepts it as reality and goes on with his life, albeit very much altered.(less)

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Dec 21, 2012 Sara rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: first-reads

I received this title as a First Read winner and was very excited to begin the book. The story caught my interest immediately. the story revolves around a series of industrial sabotage incidents. At the same time, an epidemic of child violence breaks out. The main character, Hesketh, is charged with investigating these incidents of sabotage. Hesketh is a prodigy who also suffers with Asperger's syndrome. When his stepson becomes a victim of the epidemic, he becomes personally involved in the dis...more

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Dec 14, 2012 David Hebblethwaite rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Liz Jensen’s The Rapture was one of my favourite reads a couple of years back; now she has returned with what could be seen very much as a companion piece. The Uninvited also sees a scientist investigating unusual human phenomena which turn out to herald apocalypse, and also shares a focus on the personal side of events.

Jensen’s protagonist this time around is Hesketh Lock, an anthropologist investigating corporate scandals. Hesketh’s latest assignment takes a bizarre turn when Sunny Chen, the w...more Liz Jensen’s The Rapture was one of my favourite reads a couple of years back; now she has returned with what could be seen very much as a companion piece. The Uninvited also sees a scientist investigating unusual human phenomena which turn out to herald apocalypse, and also shares a focus on the personal side of events.

Jensen’s protagonist this time around is Hesketh Lock, an anthropologist investigating corporate scandals. Hesketh’s latest assignment takes a bizarre turn when Sunny Chen, the whistle-blower from a Taiwanese timber company, throws himself into a pulping machine. That’s only the first of several similar incidents worldwide; at the same time, children begin to kill their families violently. Hesketh, a pattern-spotter by both profession and inclination, searches for a connection – even when his experiences lead him down a path that goes against all his rational instincts.

Again as with The Rapture, Jensen’s protagonist comes under pressure in the areas of life where he feels it most acutely. Hesketh’s ability to analyse and find patterns was where he felt most secure, and of course now that’s now being undermined by the apparently irrational crisis. However, he’s also feeling tested in the area of relationships: his Asperger’s Syndrome has made them difficult enough already, such that Hesketh has had to leave his partner Kaitlin. But at least he’s always felt that he knows how to communicate with his stepson Freddy – and this area of stability is now also being challenged.

Jensen handles the characterisation of Hesketh well. His personal quirks (such as a fascination with origami, and an instinctive knowledge of the Dulux colour chart) come across not as gimmicks but as anchor-points in his life (symbolically so when he folds origami models from the pages of a medical report that he’d rather not face). Hesketh is not characterised simply as someone who is great with data but inept with people – Jensen is subtler than that. The protagonist does have his difficulties with relating with people, but for the most part, he gets by. There are a couple of conversations where we realise (and Hesketh doesn’t) that he’s saying the wrong thing; but the effect is jarring – they stand out because they’re so infrequent.

The character who, for me, most brings home the emotional impact of The Uninvited’s catastrophe is not Hesketh, but his boss, Ashok Sharma. In some ways, Sharma is the opposite of Hesketh: he comes across as a smooth operator who knows what to say to everyone. But, when the plight affecting the world’s children knocks on Sharma’s door, he can’t stay that way, and becomes a deeper character. That two such different individuals as Hesketh and Sharma are so strongly affected is a way of showing just how far-reaching The Univited’s crisis is.

In its later sections, The Uninvited focuses more strongly on its disaster-novel aspect, and I don’t think it works quite so well – but I must acknowledge that this could just be because find the actual nature of what’s happening in Jensen’s novel is less interesting to me than exploring the characters’ reactions to it. The Uninvited seems to me to be less about human response to catastrophe than response to the threat of catastrophe, and the great emotional challenge that entails. The challenge for Hesketh Lock is to see how – or even if – he can deal with extreme emotional situations. What Jensen does so well in The Uninvited is to explore a global problem through the microcosm of one person’s life.(less)

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Dec 05, 2012 Shannon rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

**Disclaimer: The publisher provided a free digital ARC of this book for review purposes.

Also it was a PDF that wouldn't display properly on my Nook Simple Touch, had to read it on the Nook Color. Which wouldn't have been so annoying had I liked this book more. I really prefer reading on the NST.

I can't think of anyone I would recommend this book to. It seemed to wander about. Things started off really strong going in the direction of the description. Then the prologue ended and the meandering...more

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Nov 27, 2012 Criminal Reads rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I wanted to like this book so much. However I found myself frustrated by page 36. The main character is described of being a lover of numbers. That should have been enough of a description. Instead the author finds it necessary to drive this point home by describing everything in terms of seconds. It took him 4 seconds to look down, add 7 seconds to process the information, 3 seconds to drop the pencil...Become so laborious!

By page 54 I still hadn't found any connection with any of the character...more

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Nov 20, 2012 Maxine McLister rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

What is it about books with children acting badly which makes them so compellingly creepy? Liz Jensen's new book, The Uninvited opens with a small child calmly holding a nail gun against her grandmother's neck and pulling the trigger. Soon, this type of violent act is repeated again and again as children everywhere begin killing their loved ones. As well, there are acts of sabotage in which children seem somehow to be controlling adults. And if this isn't creepy enough the children begin to form...more

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Nov 03, 2012 Stephanie rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: science-fiction, horror

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. 2.5 stars

This review originally appeared at www.readinasinglesitting.com.

If I’ve learned anything from books this year, it’s that if humanity as we know it is going to come to an end, it’s going to be kids that are the helm of it all. Liz Jensen’s The Uninvited bundles up all of the psychotic adolescence of Lord of the Flies, blends it with the freaky post-human invasion of The Midwich Cuckoos, adds in a bit of 1Q84‘s [review] blurring of temporal and experiential boundaries, and then tops it of...more 2.5 stars

This review originally appeared at www.readinasinglesitting.com.

If I’ve learned anything from books this year, it’s that if humanity as we know it is going to come to an end, it’s going to be kids that are the helm of it all. Liz Jensen’s The Uninvited bundles up all of the psychotic adolescence of Lord of the Flies, blends it with the freaky post-human invasion of The Midwich Cuckoos, adds in a bit of 1Q84‘s [review] blurring of temporal and experiential boundaries, and then tops it off with a bit of Theodore Sturgeon’s More than Human. As elevator pitches go, it’s a pretty good advertisement for birth control.

Like Murakami’s massively hyped 1Q84, The Uninvited employs a detached narrator to do its bidding, and rightly so. Murakami gave us Tengo Kawama, a quiet man-child of a character whose insight is lacking on an emotional level: his skills are in mathematics and in the analytical breaking down of events. It’s something that’s almost needed, however, in order to give balance to the chaos of time-slips, cults, freaky little people building cocoons out of goats and so on, and it’s perhaps why Jensen gives us a similar narrator in The Uninvited‘s Hesketh Lock. Lock has Asperger’s Syndrome: he’s high functioning intellectually, but has difficulty identifying emotional and communicative cues. Instead of the little people and their cocoons, however, Lock is dealing with freaky children with a penchant for salt, the building of tall structures out of household items, and a yen for murder.

Curiously, I found Lock not at all different from Murakami’s typical protagonist, with his wide-reaching ethnographic awareness, unusual job, and lonely and emotionally withheld existence. All that’s missing is the ubiquitous Murikamian cucumber sandwich, really. The similarities are there to such a degree that when I read of Lock’s habit of folding mental origami in order to soothe his frayed nerves, I couldn’t help but wonder whether this was a nod to Murakami’s work.

Murakami’s detached, unattached narrators provide a thematic and narrative counterpoint to the strange realities of his books, and Jensen’s Lock does the same in the creeping strangeness of The Uninvited. When we begin to see the true story of what’s behind all of these sudden workplace deaths and parenticides, it’s such a huge thing–a thing that has consequences for the evolution/existence of humanity as a whole–that it almost needs such a narrator to be able to offer a viewpoint that’s uncomplicated by a frenzy of emotions.
It’s in Lock’s positioning as an almost post-human, or perhaps at least a slight upgrade on the rest of us, that we begin to see resonances of The Midwich Cuckoos [review], John Wyndham’s haunting novel about an alien(?) invasion that results in the mass birth of a group of children who share a collective intelligence and who represent, possibly, an evolved form of humanity. Lock becomes placed in the middle of it all, and necessarily really, being somewhere between neurotypical humans and the evolved, experentially-connected kids who begin committing in sorts of ghastly acts in the name of some greater good whose identity we don’t learn until much later on. This, too, is perhaps true of the professor character Zellaby in The Midwich Cuckoos: he’s the only one who stands any chance of overthrowing what becomes a sort of weird military child invasion. Unfortunately for Lock, things aren’t going to be as easy in The Uninvited, perhaps because his (pseudo)adopted son Freddy is caught up in all the madness, where Zellaby’s daughter miscarried her “cuckoo” child, severing any similar possible connection.

Many of the same issues that occur in The Midwich Cuckoos crop up in The Uninvited as well. For example, the legal status of “evolved” individuals, especially given that they’re minors and have curtailed participative rights anyway. How do you treat a group of people who are, in the case of The Uninvited, effectively terrorists, and in The Midwich Cuckoos, effectively insurrectionists, when they’re possibly not even people at all? In both instances, the wider society looks for proof of “outsiderness”, in order to justify treatment that would otherwise violate human rights. (NB: if you have a third kidney or like to salt your food, run away right now.) How can we apply our legal system to a group of non-humans? asks The Midwich Cuckoos. The Uninvited, on the other hand, is dealing with a much riskier group of individuals–they’re aggressively violent, not violent only in retaliation, as the cuckoos are. But in both cases, the groups are small, reliant on our resources and infrastructure, and they’re desperate to protect themselves from us–whom they see as barbaric, but yet a formidable enemy.

Interestingly, where The Midwich Cuckoos largely keeps its focus to a small town in England, Jensen’s invasion is a global one, and she emphasises this nature through the culturally influenced perceptions of her characters about what’s going on. One person’s ghost is another person’s djinn. Perhaps this is the mark of a novel written in the present day as opposed to one written during the cold war era, but what made Wyndham’s book so utterly terrifying was that it’s the end of the world on a tiny, village-size scale. It’s so personal and so possible, and it’s about people like the rest of us.

The Uninvited, on the other hand, looks at our world on a grander scale, with a grander, more participative protagonist who is yet removed from the reader by the very way in which he processes the world. It’s still creepy, but it’s at its creepiest when it’s zoomed in to Hesketh’s relationship with Freddy than it is exploring the situation panoramically: thousands of freaky, but largely anonymous kids running around killing largely anonymous people. It’s probably an effective parallel between that time and ours: our own ways of disconnectedness and insularity, which occur not because we don’t know what’s going on around us, but because there’s so much of it that we have to filter it all out. But at the same time, it doesn’t quite resonate in the same way.

For me, the sheer scope of The Uninvited was what caused it to fall short for me. It feels meandering and confused for the first third–or even two thirds–however, when the pieces begin to come together at the end, the reveal is so large and grandiose that it almost needs to be the beginning of the story, not the end of it. And yet, how do you even go about writing such a thing? Is the end of the world really the end of the world? Or is the mere awareness that the world as we know it is about to end enough to stand in for the physical end itself? It’s a formidable concept, but one that I didn’t feel was done justice here.(less)

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Oct 24, 2012 Rosina Lippi rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: netgalley, fiction, reviewed-here

Two little boys murder their father with a knife, which would be shocking at any other time -- but all over the world, very young children are killing the people they love best, and remember nothing afterward. Odder still, they show no emotion about the death. Also on a global scale, established, successful, loyal business people commit senseless acts of sabotage at their companies and then commit suicide raving about being harassed by small creatures -- djinn, or elves, or similar.

Sometimes th...more

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Sep 17, 2012 Marleen rated it 5 of 5 stars

Copy received from Bloomsbury through Book Geeks.

It starts with one child, a young girl, taking a nail gun and killing her grandmother before injuring her father for no apparent reason. It seems to be a random occurrence, a one-off event, tragic and shocking but unique. Hesketh Lock hears about this murder while on his way to the airport. He is travelling from England to Taiwan to investigate a bizarre corporate scandal.
Hesketh Lock has Asperger’s Syndrome and isn’t good at relationships or read...more Copy received from Bloomsbury through Book Geeks.

It starts with one child, a young girl, taking a nail gun and killing her grandmother before injuring her father for no apparent reason. It seems to be a random occurrence, a one-off event, tragic and shocking but unique. Hesketh Lock hears about this murder while on his way to the airport. He is travelling from England to Taiwan to investigate a bizarre corporate scandal.
Hesketh Lock has Asperger’s Syndrome and isn’t good at relationships or reading people. He is however very good at spotting and reading behaviour patterns which explains his job as trouble shooter for a company specialising in investigating corporate fraud, exposing it and eliminating it forever. However, his investigation in Taiwan doesn’t provide him with any useful or logical answers. If anything, his meeting with the man who exposed the scandal leaves Hesketh with more questions than answers. When his Taiwanese contact subsequently commits suicide the case becomes even murkier. Then things quickly escalate. More bizarre cases of corporate fraud are exposed, all apparently conducted by the most unlikely suspects who tend to be confused after their fraudulent acts and end up dying shortly afterwards. And at the same time more children, all over the world, are attacking and killing adults. With no apparent reasons for these murders and the children going through a dramatic change immediately before and after the violence, authorities are at a loss to explain what is happening. But the violence is spreading and panic, as well as all sorts of (conspiracy) theories are becoming rampant. When Hesketh establishes a link between the disruptions in the corporate world and the crimes committed by the children it appears to be an impossible proposition. With his stepson starting to exhibit troubling behaviour, Hesketh finds himself in a situation that could as easily overwhelm him as bring him to the realisation of what exactly is happening.

This story is shocking on several levels. First there is all the violence committed by children. It is never easy to read about children as the perpetrators of violent crime and since that is the central story-line in this book it is hard not to get emotionally involved. What makes the story even more disturbing is that it is written in such a way that you end up feeling that something like this could actually happen. Yes, it is a fantastical story line, but one based on enough fact to make it just about plausible. While reading this book I felt my heart breaking on several occasions; how could a parent, family, the world ever hope to deal with children turning against the adults in their lives? And would we really react in the way as described in this book?

In Hesketh Lock the author has created a fascinating protagonist. Because of his Asperger’s he is logical to a fault. This makes him the perfect narrator for this story in which the events taking place are so horrific that non-sentimental descriptions are necessary if the reader is going to stick with the story. Hesketh has a linear way of thinking which is brutally honest and at times heartbreaking. He is very aware of his shortcomings and completely unable to do anything about them. That is not to say he should be pitied; Hesketh is very secure in the knowledge that there are certain things he can do better than most people because his special make-up means he’s better equipped to do them. He is, for example very quick to observe patterns where others see none.

“Perhaps she pities me. It’s a frequent mistake. People misunderstand who I am, and assume I want to be like them. I don’t.”

Hesketh’s former partner and the mother of his stepson used to call him “A robot made of meat.” And although he doesn’t think he is such a robot there comes a time when Hesketh thinks that being just that might be what he needs.

This book is very well written and almost too easy to read. A story like this should be read slowly, but Liz Jensen’s writing is so fluid that I found myself turning the pages at a quick pace regardless of the horrors that were taking place on them. And maybe that is exactly what is needed with a story as shocking as this one. I think I might have put the book aside if I had allowed myself too much time to linger on exactly what was happening. That would have been such a waste though. Combining several genres – mystery, psychological thriller, and dystopian-apocalyptical nightmare - this is a highly original, thought-provoking, very well written and intriguing story.
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Jan 10, 2013 Jill rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is the first book I’ve read in a long time that defies easy categorizing. Some may call it a dystopian sci-fi fable; others may believe it is a psychological cautionary tale; still others may view it as an anthropological-based literary thriller. In fact, it is all of these and none of these. It is a truly original piece of work.

The main character, Hesketh Lock, is a handsome, intelligent anthropologist with Asperger’s syndrome. He excels at this work because he can eliminate all the messy...more This is the first book I’ve read in a long time that defies easy categorizing. Some may call it a dystopian sci-fi fable; others may believe it is a psychological cautionary tale; still others may view it as an anthropological-based literary thriller. In fact, it is all of these and none of these. It is a truly original piece of work.

The main character, Hesketh Lock, is a handsome, intelligent anthropologist with Asperger’s syndrome. He excels at this work because he can eliminate all the messy emotional debris and focus squarely on the facts. Called “a robot made of meat” by his former significant other, he specializes in corporate sabotage troubleshooting.

Yet soon, the consistently rational Hesketh is floored by a pattern of deaths involving indigenous superstitions. Formerly conscientious workers in three different countries – Taiwan, Sweden and Dubai – are involved in sabotage and self-destruction. A collective subconscious seems to be at play, through the evocation of ghostly ancestors, trolls and djinns. The question is: “If it’s a shared narrative, are they collectively re-enacting an old myth, or creating a new one?”

There is something else amiss in the world as well. Young children are suddenly turning feral; a seven-year-old girl puts a nail gun to her grandmother’s neck and fires…other children are murdering their families ruthlessly. Hesketh has a personal stake in these atrocities. He has a strong bond with his young stepson, Freddy, which brings these events home to a personal level.

Men attacking institutions they love…children turning on families…two overlapping circles, with irrational violence at the intersection. What connects them? And how will Lock, a logic-based narrator with an obsession for origami and compulsion to match skin tones and clothes to a Dulux paint chart, unravel what is at the core of all this?

This is a thinking person’s book that’s not afraid to tackle the multiple explanations humans give to ascribe meaning to existence with wisps of the legacy we are leaving behind. I found it to be brilliant – a little slow to get into and then absolutely page turning. One thing’s for certain: some of these images may inhabit your dreams and that’s the mark of a really good writer.

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Nov 01, 2012 CookieDemon rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, netgalley-early-reads, science-fiction

**Review copy received via Netgalley**

For me, this novel was such a slow-burner I wasn’t sure I would be able to get into it at all. After a surprisingly graphic, attention-grabbing opening chapter the pace settles down rather too drastically for my liking and I have to confess that I found my attention wandering a bit. Following the obligatory introduction of protagonists and a new story-thread however, I was immediately pulled back into the plot- and I’m glad I stuck with it, as ultimately I w...more **Review copy received via Netgalley**

For me, this novel was such a slow-burner I wasn’t sure I would be able to get into it at all. After a surprisingly graphic, attention-grabbing opening chapter the pace settles down rather too drastically for my liking and I have to confess that I found my attention wandering a bit. Following the obligatory introduction of protagonists and a new story-thread however, I was immediately pulled back into the plot- and I’m glad I stuck with it, as ultimately I was rewarded with a pretty gripping story. This is the first Liz Jensen book I have read, but I can guarantee it won’t be my last.

This story takes creepy, violent children and some strange suicidal occurrences around the globe and successfully crafts them into an interconnecting story, all narrated from the viewpoint of Hesketh Lock, a patterns analyst with Aspergers Syndrome who seems able to join the dots a lot more quickly than his counterparts can. Through Hesketh’s eyes, the reader is able to witness some very unsettling events, as well as what may be the start of a terrifying dystopian nightmare...

As an aside, I have to say that the Netgalley formatting of this novel did it absolutely no favours. With missing letters within the narrative, trying to puzzle out some of the words made this story’s plot more complex than even I had expected! Discounting that however, I genuinely loved meeting Hesketh and his co-workers and reading about the completely changing world that as a rational, logical person he struggled to explain.

The Uninvited is a great story with a brilliant premise and some excellent characters throughout. Hesketh is crafted remarkably well and his struggles with both people and relationships and some of his ‘cringe worthy’ encounters add some much light-hearted humour to what is an otherwise complex, dark story. Because of the traits that come hand in hand with his aspergers, he is unable to be anything but brutally honest, and as a consequence is a wholly reliable narrator, which makes a change in this sort of psychological thriller.

Aspects of this novel were chilling and made for some uncomfortable reading, yet I found myself completely engrossed in what was going on and unable to stop turning the pages. The writing is intense, the scene-setting vivid. Tapping into the premise of scary children is always going to be a winner as it is achieved so successfully within horror movies; yet reading it in black and white is admittedly no less frightening or suspenseful. If as a reader you can get past the clunky, slow beginning then you are definitely in for a real ride with this book....
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Mar 23, 2013 Judy Riggs rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Page turner! HesKeth, an investigator with Asperger's syndrome, spots behaviorial patterns as children around the globe kill family members

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Jan 16, 2013 Becky rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

It begins with the investigation of an act of corporate sabotage. That's Hesketh Lock's job. He has a knack for recognizing patterns and the job is quite simply perfect for a man of his talents, or quirks as they may be. Hesketh has Aspberger's. But wait, that's not really where the story begins. It begins with a murder. A little girl wearing butterfly pajamas who kills her grandmother with a nail gun before turning it on her father and blinding him. Hesketh is intrigued by reports of the case a...more

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Oct 25, 2012 Renee rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

**Disclaimer: The publisher provided a free digital ARC of this book for review purposes.

This book started with a bang. Actually, it yanked me in violently. But after the first page, it kind of petered out for few chapters. “The Uninvited” takes its time to reclaim its reader, but readers that stick with it are definitely rewarded. While the events in the novel are unlikely to happen, Jensen convinces the reader that it could. I think this is the vital ingredient in the success of this story.

Li...more

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