And like any good storyteller worth his or her salt, Lebbon does not use kid gloves with his characters. As I said, I was pulling for Ally almost immediately of being introduced to her, and as the pages went on, I only cared about her and her family more. Like any good monster movie (or book), you have to have players people are going to care about to make the story more powerful, and Lebbon knocks it out of the park here. What really stands out in The Silence isn't the vesps but the characters. I'm generally not a fan of this particular style, but here it really works because Lebbon wisely keeps the tension ramped up as he bounces back between these two characters, each telling a similar but different story from how they perceive things. The book is split between her first-person point of view and her father, Huw's, third-person point of view.
Within the first three or four pages, I was hooked and rooting for Ally, the deaf fourteen-year-old protagonist of the story. It's been a long time since I was grabbed early and forcefully in a book like I was with The Silence. It isn't long until it's determined that the vesps hunt via sound and the trick is to remain absolutely silent if you don't want to be something's dinner and/or an incubator for its eggs.
Soon, these creatures known as vesps start making their way across Europe and the rest of the planet. When a research team in Moldova goes spelunking in a cave that had been sealed for who knows how long, they inadvertently release a swarm of terrifying monsters into the world whose only purpose is to eat and populate. That is until I read Tim Lebbon's The Silence, where silence is not only golden, it's survival. Don't get me wrong, there are certainly times when I'm in full support of that proverb, like when I hear babies crying, but on the whole, I never really agreed with the proverb. As someone who is boisterous by nature – my sister says the room gets louder just by me walking into it – I've never bought into that proverb. There's an old saying that goes "Silence is golden".
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