The Uninvited

By Liz Jensen

A seven-year-old girl puts a nail gun to her grandmother's neck and fires. An isolated incident, say the experts. The experts are wrong. Across the world, children are killing their families. Is violence contagious? As chilling murders by children grip the country, anthropologist Hesketh Lock has his own mystery to solve: a bizarre scandal in the Taiwan timber industry.

Hesketh has never been good at relationships: Asperger's Syndrome has seen to that. But he does have a talent for spotting behavioral patterns and an outsider's fascination with group dynamics. Nothing obvious connects Hesketh's Asian case with the atrocities back home. Or with the increasingly odd behavior of his beloved stepson, Freddy. But when Hesketh's Taiwan contact dies shockingly and more acts of sabotage and child violence sweep the globe, he is forced to acknowledge possibilities that defy the rational principles on which he has staked his life, his career, and, most devastatingly of all, his role as a father.

Part psychological thriller, part dystopian nightmare, The Uninvited is a powerful and viscerally unsettling portrait of apocalypse in embryo.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Release date: Jan 8, 2013
• ISBN: 9781620400265

Liz Jensen

Liz Jensen is the bestselling author of eight acclaimed novels, including the Guardian-shortlisted Ark Baby, War Crimes for the Home, The Ninth Life of Louis Drax, The Rapture, shortlisted for the Brit Writers' Awards and selected as a Channel 4 TV Book Club Best Read, and, most recently, The Uninvited. She has been nominated three times for the Orange Prize for Fiction and her work has been published in more than twenty countries. Liz Jensen lives in Wimbledon, London. www.lizjensen.com

Book preview

Author

Prologue

Mass hysterical outbreaks rarely have identifiable inceptions, but the date I recall most vividly is Sunday 16th September, when a young child in butterfly pyjamas slaughtered her grandmother with a nail-gun to the neck. The attack took place in a family living-room in a leafy Harrogate cul-de-sac, the kind where no one drops litter and you can still hear birdsong.

Three shots. Three half-inch bolts of steel. The jugular didn’t stand a chance.

No reason, no warning.

The little girl’s father was the first on the scene. Hearing a blunt vocal noise – the woman had tried to scream – he rushed in to find her haemorrhaging on the sofa, while the kid sat staring at the wall in a trance that resembled open-eyed sleep. When the others joined him and saw the blood, they all had the same thought: a terrible accident.

But it was a mistake to think that, because a few seconds later the child jolted awake and grabbed the tool again. Before anyone realised her intention, she’d put it to her father’s face and fired.

Eyes are delicate, so no chance there either. He was fortunate it wasn’t worse.

A lightweight pump-action Black & Decker. One murder, one blinding. Two minutes. No accident.

She can’t have been the first. But I’ll call her Child One.

At the time of the assault, she had just turned seven.

Is violence contagious? By what mechanism does a series of apparently random events start cohering into a narrative of cause and effect? Can there be such a thing as psychic occupation?

For me, these became pressing questions.

The day the news broke, I’d just flown in from Taiwan. In the car park of Glasgow airport I blinked in the sunshine. After the pressurised heat of downtown Taipei, the air shuddered with freshness. While my plane was touching down, the little girl was preparing her weapon. By the time I’d cleared customs, she’d executed the attack. And as I drove towards the coast and the ferry, skirting the sprawling edges of grey Scottish towns, two police officers were contemplating a crime scene which they later described as ‘the most distressing and perverted’ of their careers.

I lived, at the time, on the island of Arran, in a landscape that flitted unpredictably between light and dark: shafts of sunlight, charcoal clouds, sudden rainbows, the pale featherings of fog on scrub, the pewter glint of the Atlantic. I’d rented a stone cottage on the eastern coast straight after my split with Kaitlin: ideal for someone who cherishes his solitude and needs only appear at Head Office on the rare occasion. It was dark and low-ceilinged. The front door opened on to a flank of scrubland a short walk from the shore: in the middle distance lay the rhomboid outline of a black granite rock and a cluster of hawthorns, side-swiped by wind. I could watch the rotating blades of the wind turbines on the horizon for hours. At the back of the cottage, by an abandoned vegetable patch, lay some rusted tractor parts and an enamel bathtub on brick supports which a previous tenant had turned into a crude pond. When I cleared away the chickweed, I found a pale goldfish. Once in a while I’d empty the toaster and feed it crumbs.

‘Here, Mr Fish, Mr Fish, Mr Fish!’ I’d say. Strange to hear a human voice, in that empty place.

There are certain fixtures in my life which constitute a kind of home. The antique optometrist’s charts in Cyrillic, Hindi, Chinese and Arabic that Professor Whybray bequeathed me when he retired; my paint catalogues, foreign-language dictionaries and folk-tale compendiums; some of the mathematical diagrams and origami models I’ve constructed across the years, and a cardboard dinosaur Freddy made at primary school. Good shelving is important. I have that too. I’m a creature of habit. After three days in Taiwan working flat out on the sabotage case, it was comforting to be surrounded by what I cherish. Fortress Hesketh, Kaitlin used to call me. Entry forbidden. If she had a point – and yes, the general consensus was that she had – then my self-containment wasn’t something I had a mind to fix.

I had one day to write up the Taipei investigation, and explain the anomaly of Sunny Chen. That’s what was preoccupying me as I unpacked my suitcase. Five identical shirts, ditto boxer shorts, two pairs of trousers, wash-bag, Chinese dictionary, electronics. I put on a wash, then flipped on the TV to catch the midday news. Growth figures up for the third consecutive season; the UN warns of ‘catastrophe within a generation’ if birth rates fail to drop; severe weather alert as Hurricane Veronica heads for the West coast. But it was the domestic atrocity that snared me. My exhaustion lent the report the drifting, sub-oceanic quality of a nightmare.

The little girl’s grandparents were on their regular weekly visit to her home. The distraught family insisted that nobody had done anything to antagonise the child. Neither on that Sunday or any other day. When she woke that morning, she was in good spirits, according to her mother. She had even recounted a dream about ‘walking around in a beautiful white desert that sparkled’. It looked like Heaven, she said.

The TV showed a semi-detached house in a Harrogate suburb. The reporter demonstrating how a small hand might clasp and operate a nail-gun of this type. A psychologist struggling to hypothesise why such a young child would turn on people she loved. An elderly neighbour declaring the family to be ‘perfectly ordinary’ and giving the detail about the pyjamas. Her own granddaughter had a similar pair. From Marks and Spencer, she said. ‘With blue butterflies on.’

Strange, what makes people cry.

I wondered what kind of blue. Celestial, Frosted Steel Aquamarine, Inky Pool, Luna? I could name you thirty-eight off the top of my head.

As a boy, I read everything I could lay my hands on, regardless of its function: dishwasher instruction manuals, TV schedules, the works of Dostoyevsky, lists of cereal ingredients, my mother’s Cosmopolitan, fishing magazines, porn. But mostly I devoured comics featuring a panoply of onomatopoeic words deployed to render specific sounds. A blow to the jaw would be BAM, while an arrow loosed from a bow might be ZOOOSHHH. A regular gun would typically go BANG. But a nail-gun’s sound is shallower, and features a distinctive click. I would spell it SCHTUUKH.

Plato suggested that the realm we inhabit after death is the same territory we lived in before birth: a fusion of time and space that encompasses both pre- and post-existence. Ever since the High Energy Research Organisation in Japan confirmed the results of CERN’s experiments in which neutrinos travelled faster than light, it has struck me that Plato was closer to the mark than anyone could have imagined. Not least Einstein, whose notion of special relativity had been violated. The fact that a unified theory of physics had come within our grasp for the first time in human history was something I came to reflect on much later, in relation to Child One’s attack and the others that followed. But perception is personal. In the early days, some saw the atrocity as a symptom of a spoiled generation’s ‘pathological’ craving for attention in a world in which the future of mankind, through its own mismanagement, appeared blasted. I’d seen no evidence of this myself, in my observations of Freddy and his entourage. On a point of style, I also considered the interpretation to be unduly masochistic. As an anthropologist I read the phenomenon more as a sick fairy tale, a parable of dysfunctional times. None of us got it right. The message was written in letters too big to read, letters that could only be deciphered from a vast distance or an unusual angle. We were as good as blind. This, by the way, is a figurative expression. Unlike many on the spectrum, I can deploy those.

The nail-gun murder struck me with particular force because Child One was Freddy’s age: seven. Having made the association, I couldn’t help picturing my stepson aiming his catapult at another human being and letting fly.

Who is Freddy’s chosen target, in this image?

It doesn’t put me in a good light, but I’ll say it anyway, because it’s the truth: his mother, Kaitlin.

I see Freddy, with his curly black hair and pixie face, take aim and fire at her heart – zoooshhh – and I hear her cry of shock.

One of my chief coping mechanisms, in mental emergencies, involves origami: I carry an imaginary sheaf of delicate rice paper in my head, in a range of shades, to fold into classical shapes. When the image of Freddy shooting Kaitlin first reared up I swiftly folded eleven of the Japanese cranes known as ozuru, but I couldn’t banish it. Kaitlin used to call me, affectionately, an ‘incurable materialist’. Later, this changed to ‘a robot made of meat’. This is unfair. I’m not a machine. I feel things. I just register them differently. The story of the pyjama-clad killer and the unwelcome images it inspired rocked my equilibrium.

After she confessed to her affair, and its excruciating nature, and the lies (‘white lies’, she insisted) that she’d told to cover it, Kaitlin and I stuck it out for a while, at her insistence. This involved a form of mental torture known as relationship counselling.

What do you most admire about Kaitlin, Hesketh?

Kaitlin, can you identify what attracted you to Hesketh when you first met?

As well as being irrelevant to the issue in hand, it was purposeless. There are certain things I am not cut out to do. Fieldwork, my mentor Professor Whybray always told me, was ‘very probably’ one of them. Sharing my life with a woman, I’d long suspected, was another. The fact that my first and only attempt had ended in failure confirmed it definitively. I would not be trying again. I moved away from London and the home Kaitlin still shared with Freddy. I have always been fascinated by islands, both linguistically and because of the social-Darwinian speculations they invite, so Arran suited me perfectly. That said, I saw few people: the cottage stood alone, five miles from the nearest village, in a landscape of sea and heather, boulders and sheep. Here, with the capital far behind me, I took strategic command of myself by developing a ritualised schedule of work and half-hour walks, began work on an ambitious origami mollusc project, and trained myself to think of Kaitlin in the past tense. But nothing could fill the vacuum left by the boy.

‘Look at me properly. In the eye,’ Kaitlin used to say, at the climax of a fight, or sex.

It was a kind of taunt. She knew I couldn’t. That I’d simply turn my face away or shut my eyes tighter.

When she got me, she got the things I was, including the elements of my personality she deemed defective. She got the package called Hesketh Lock and all that it contained. Where was the logic in wanting me to be someone other than myself?

Freddy never did that. He’d never heard of Asperger’s syndrome. And if he had, he wouldn’t have cared. He accepted me from the start. To him I was Hesketh.

Just Hesketh.

Anthropology is a science which requires you to observe your fellow men and women, their traditions and their beliefs, as you would members of another species. The impulse to fabulate is a natural response to a confusing and contradictory world. Grasping this helped me to unlock the thought systems of my fellow men, and move on from the state of frustrated bafflement that dogged my childhood and teenage years. I grew adept at sketching mental flow charts to track the repercussions of real events as well as hypothetical scenarios. Tracing narrative patterns through the overlapping circles of Venn diagrams – still my tool of choice – revealed to me the endless interconnectedness of human imagination and memory. Armed with these templates, I worked on adapting my behaviour. Under Professor Whybray’s tutelage, I learned to mimic and then assimilate some of the behaviours I observed. I was not the first: others had exploited their apparent disadvantage with great success, he told me – most notably an internationally celebrated Professor of Behavioural Psychology. But apparently I still lack some of the ‘normal social graces’. Men like Ashok, my boss at Phipps & Wexman, tend to take me as they find me. Women are different. They see a tall, dark, well-built man with strongly delineated features, and this classic combination triggers something at cellular level: a biological imperative. When they discover my personality is at odds with what they wishfully intuit from my ‘handsomeness’, their disappointment is boundless. It’s often accompanied by a disturbing rage.

Ashok once said to me, ‘We’re all liars, bud. It’s human nature.’

No, I thought. He’s wrong. Through a quirk of DNA, I am not part of that ‘we’. I can get obsessive about things. Or sidetracked. I can appear brutal too, I’m told.

But I know right from wrong. And I revere the truth.

So you will at least find in me an honest narrator.

In the days that followed the Harrogate attack, the little girl in blue butterfly pyjamas still refused to speak.

GIRL WHO DREAMED OF HEAVEN –

AND MADE HELL

SICK CHERUB’S SHOTS OF HATE

What happened next to the child whose dream about a sparkling white desert gave birth to such lurid headlines? Speculating on the possibilities and their variables, I pictured the family moving to another part of the country, or even abroad, to start a new life. The child would accompany them, if the father could still bear to be around her. If not, they’d install her in a secure home. I’ll admit that I considered the case to be as unique as it was isolated: a thing of its own and of itself. I am a natural joiner of dots, and I saw no dots to join.

And then came the distressing phone call about Sunny Chen, which sent my thoughts hurtling back to Taiwan. And because of the drastic nature of what followed, Child One was relegated to the back of my mind.

Chapter 1

The phenomenon known as the fairy ring is caused by fungal spore pods spreading outwards like a water ripple around a biologically dead zone. In European legend, they represent the gateway to the fairy world, a parallel universe with its own laws and time-scales. The rings are evidence of dark forces: demons, shooting stars, lightning strikes.

Jump into one and bad luck will befall you.

From the air, Taipei is like a fairy ring: a city built in a crater encircled by mountains.

It was early morning when my plane touched down, but the day’s heat was already rising. I’d spent the flight from Manchester to Taipei listening to audio lessons on headphones to brush up on my Mandarin. When the last one came to an end, I pressed play and started again from the beginning. I once attended an intensive language course in Shanghai, hoping to refine elements of my PhD. Linguistically, I am more of a reader than a speaker, so inevitably it was the ideograms that excited me most. I’d copy pages of Chinese characters and use the dictionary to make translations.

The effort on the plane paid off. My taxi driver understood me when I gave him directions. The air shimmered invigoratingly, reminding me of TV static.

I dislike change of any kind. But paradoxically, something in me – a kind of information-hunger – seeks and requires it. If sharks stop moving, they die. Kaitlin once said my brain was like that. We drove past suburban tower blocks stacked like grubby sugar cubes; flat-screen billboards and rotating hoardings that advertised toothpaste, nappies, kung-fu movies, mobile phones. All this alongside glimpses of an older order: street hawkers selling tofu, lychees, starfruit, sweets, caged chickens and cigarettes beneath tattered frangipanis and jacarandas. Violet bougainvillea frothed over fences, and potted orchids swayed in the breeze. Even with sunglasses on, the intense light drilled into my retinas. Here and there, on street corners or in doorways and temple entrances, thin trails of incense smoke drifted up from offerings to the dead: fruit, sweets, paper money. For the Chinese, September is Ghost Month. The spirits of the dead pour out from Hell, demanding food and appeasement, and wreaking havoc.

I inhaled the foreignness.

Fraud is a business like any other. Anthropologically speaking, it involves the meeting, co-operation and communication of tribes. The space between sharp practice and corporate fraud is the delicate territory Phipps & Wexman regularly treads. As Ashok tells clients in his presentations: ‘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. Phipps & Wexman has the best investigative brains in the business. And we have the success stories to prove it. Sanwell, the Go Corporation, Quattro, GTTL, Klein and Mason: all companies whose reputations have been definitively recast by our profile makeovers.’ I have heard this speech eighteen and a quarter times. I even feature in it. (‘Hesketh Lock, our cross-culture specialist, who has analysed sabotage patterns from Indonesia to Iceland.’) Ashok has that easy American way with audiences. ‘Nobody at Phipps & Wexman claims to be saving the world,’ he continues, ‘but we’re sure as hell pouring oil on its troubled waters.’ It always stimulates the clients, this notion that we’re healers. Shamans, even. It was the brainchild of Stephanie Mulligan, a behavioural psychologist with whom I have an excruciating history.

They clap and clap.

Hardwood trees are slow to grow, and prices have skyrocketed in recent years. There were logging restrictions, even before the weak anti-deforestation protocols. But where there’s a will, there’s a loophole. And a panoply of crooks. The fraudulent trading of hardwoods culled from protected forestland is a global business lucrative enough to have spawned countless millionaires. Jenwai Timber’s bosses and their suppliers and shippers among them.

The week before my visit to Taiwan, an anonymous source had sent the Taipei branch of the police’s Fraud Investigation Office a set of documentation relating to the purchase of hardwood for Jenwai’s timber factory from a Malaysian supplier. These impressively produced forgeries had served to whitewash a raft of illegal transactions concerning wood sourced in Laos and marked, for good measure, with apparently legitimate stamps. The paperchase that followed the first police raid triggered further investigations, and within a matter of days, the entire Laos–Taiwan element of an extensive international logging scandal was exposed. Detectives, environmental campaigners and the media were already busy writing up their reports. But my own assessment would be of a very different nature.

As investigators affiliated to a multi-national legal firm, we’d been hired by Ganjong Inc., the parent organisation under which Jenwai Timber traded. At Jenwai Timber, the main players consisted of corrupt NGO staff, Laotian traffickers, Thai middlemen and Chinese factory managers. And one employee with a conscience. My mission was to find him.

In most organisations, whistle-blowing is seen as a form of sabotage. But it’s impolitic to say this publicly. Phipps & Wexman’s brochures delicately classify the phenomenon as ‘a sub-story in a wider David and Goliath narrative of workplace unrest’. Officially, I was in Taiwan to identify the whistle-blower, pronounce him a hero and award him a generous financial package or ‘golden thank you’ for alerting Ganjong Inc., via the police, to the corruption it had – unwittingly, it stressed – presided over. In reality, I was there to do a situation autopsy, as a part of a wider damage-limitation exercise.

The Taipei branch of the national Fraud Investigation Office, a modest low-rise to the south of the city, had the feel of a huge walk-in fridge. Here, over the course of several hours, kept awake by coffee, I heard several theories about the whistle-blower’s identity from the police and a sharp-featured young journalist who had covered the case for his newspaper. Although they were curious about his identity, their main concern was the crime itself, and the domino effect of its exposure. They seemed puzzled that Ganjong should have called in a Western personnel specialist.

‘It’s known as the Outsider Impartiality Effect,’ I tell them. ‘My presence here is Ganjong’s message that it rewards honesty and condemns corruption. Standard strategy.’

The sharp-featured journalist made a face I interpreted as ‘wry’ and said, ‘Cover your ass, right?’ And they all laughed. He went on to speculate that the mystery man was in fact female, and the wife of a Jenwai manager who had been having an affair with a bar-girl. This prompted further theories: a shop-floor grudge, a power tussle between senior managers, a rival company’s attempt to bring Jenwai down, infiltration by eco-campaigners. I spent the rest of the day probing deeper, only to find the actual evidence was either thin or non-existent. It’s often the case, at the beginning of an investigation, that you spend eight hours in an over-air-conditioned office, learning what seems barely one level up from rumour. It’s only later that you might spot a stray detail that’s part of a bigger pattern, and things fall into place. Over 80 per cent of the time, that doesn’t happen.

The next morning I was at the timber plant on the outskirts of Taipei by 8.25 for my meeting with Mr Yeh, the only Jenwai manager untouched by the scandal: at the time of the illegal wood-trafficking transactions, he’d been on sick leave with colon cancer. The air was humid, and pulsed with the heavy, electric heat that heralds thunder. Undulating lines of altocumulus castellanus and altocumulus floccus patterned the sky.

The plant itself was a functional warehouse building in a high-fenced compound. In the office section near the front gates, the skeletal Mr Yeh welcomed me with a dry handshake and we exchanged business cards. I accepted his with both hands according to custom. The skin of his scalp, which was the distinctive yellow-grey of Dulux’s 1997 River Pearl, looked alarmingly thin and desiccated.

‘I am pleased to meet you Mr Lock. You are very tall,’ he said. Then he laughed. In Chinese culture, amusement display can mask embarrassment.

‘One metre and ninety-eight centimetres,’ I told him, pre-emptively. ‘But I’ve stopped growing, I promise.’ This is a joke I have learned to deploy to ‘break the ice’, but Yeh didn’t laugh, as Westerners tend to, so I inclined my head and told him in Chinese that I was honoured to meet him. This worked better: he broke into a cadaverous smile and complimented me on my facility. I told him languages were a hobby of mine, though my Chinese was unfortunately rudimentary.

‘Call me Martin.’ His English was assured and American-accented.

‘If you’ll call me Hesketh.’

‘Hesketh. Unusual name.’

‘Originally Norse. It means horse-racetrack.’

‘Horse-racetrack?’ He laughed. ‘And Lock is a Chinese name. But spelled L-O-K. In Cantonese it means happiness. Joy. Good name. Lucky name. Lucky-Lok.’ He paused. ‘So if you should bet on horses, you win. Ha ha.’ Then his face changed. ‘As soon as the current orders are completed the factory will close. It is a terrible situation, Mr Lock. Hesketh. It pains me.’ He touched his chest, as if to show me precisely where it hurt. In the cottage, five to the left on Shelf Three, I have a book of da Vinci’s anatomical drawings. The valves, aortas and arteries of an ox heart are on page eighteen. ‘By the way. I am sorry for the way I look. I know it is shocking.’

‘No, I’m interested.

Reviews for The Uninvited

[shelley.s · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book was immense. I really had no idea how it was going to go at all, it was a bargain 99p book from The Works, didn't think id even like it but my friend had read it and said it was good and i needed something new so i just grabbed it as a spur of the moment thing. It was fantastic! Nothing like i thought it would be, i thought it was going to be a horror but it was definatly a psychological thriller. Creepy, scary and a stark realization when you get to the end that maybe we do need intervention before we ruin the planet, this takes that to a whole new level though. I loved the characters, they felt so real, Hesketh is written so brilliantly he could be someone i know easily. His aspergers and his habits fit really well with the story and add so much to it without taking away from the plot. Freddy and his decline is literally heart breaking and i felt for Hesketh so much it was actually really emotional to read by the end. It definatly was a lump in the throat moment. I'm still kind of sad about the ending, i really wanted it to be happy and rosy because i adored Hesketh so much, unfortunately it wasn't to be. I cant recommend this book enough. Im so glad i picked it up. Fabulous author, fantastic book, must read!

[serenity_tigerlily · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

At first glance everything about this book screams creepy. The cover of an evil looking child, the little summary on the inside cover that instantly hooks you. However, this book quickly goes from a horror novel to something else and the children turned murderers are quickly on the back burner. This isn't a horror book and it was disappointing since I expected a gruesome book about kids that suddenly become murderers instead I got a book about a the relationship between a man and his stepson.For what it is the book is okay, just not what I was expecting and left me disappointed.

[squeakychu · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It is lucky for the author of this book that I even decided to finish it. The book opens with a series of extremely violent acts perpetrated upon adults by children. The it moves to the life of Heskethe Lock, a competent cultural anthropologist who is sent to various sites worldwide by his boss Ashok to gather details of corporate sabotage. Heskethe has just left his former girlfriend for a surprising reason, but is still very much attached to her son Freddy whom Heskethe treats as his own son. This is the first third of the book. If this sounds like a boring read to this point, it is. What makes this book interesting is what develops later. If you have the fortitude to bear with this book's rough start, you'll find an inventive story which ties all of the disparate pieces together and an interesting look into the workings of the mind of Heskethe, an individual with Asperger's syndrome. I like how the author uses some of the definitive traits of a person with Asperger's syndrome to make a highly likable main character. The science fiction part of this book, once revealed, was what made my interest in finishing this story heat up.

[stahl2ricco · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Good read, right from the first line! A man with Asperger's syndrome is investigating the sabotage of a company, when many others occur too! And children are attacking their adults! And it's spreading! Well, that's the gist of this story, and it moves along at a quick, crisp pace. I liked it a lot, and was even a bit sad when it was over. Was the whole thing a virus, aliens, body snatchers, or some zombie/vampire thing? You gotta read it!

[cherylk_44 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

When I first saw this book I was very intrigued by it. The cover and the back summary of the book. Yes, please. I had to read this book to find out what was causing all of these children to go psycho and kill people. I agree with others that this book is not a horror story. Even though the front cover would lead you to think it is. The opening scene of this book had me hooked. I could not wait to dig deeper into the story to learn the truth. After this the story just went flatline. It was a struggle for me to read the next few chapters. Even to call this book a psychological thriller would be a stretch. It was pretty evident soon that I had lost interest in the story and learning the truth. I guess I will never learn the truth.

[khal_khaleesi · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

(This review can also be found on my blog The (Mis)Adventures of a Twenty-Something Year Old Girl).

When I saw that Liz Jensen had written a new book, I knew I wanted to read it. I loved her book The Rapture and was hoping The Uninvited would be just as good. However, I was disappointed with this book.

Hesketh is a man who has Asperger's Syndrome. He is sent by his company to investigate cases of whistle blowers and sabotage within companies. When Hesketh goes to investigate his first case in Taiwan, he gets more than he bargained for. The supposed whistle blower seems to be talking non-sense. The next day, the whistle blower commits suicide. Soon, this is happening all over the world. Not only that, but it children all over the world are attacking adults. What's going on? Will Hesketh be able to find the answer before it's too late?

The title of The Uninvited suits the book. Like most of my reviews, I don't want to go into too much detail as to why the title fits because I don't want to give away any spoilers.

I found this particular cover to be a bit plain for my liking. The cover didn't catch my attention. (It was the synopsis that did). This cover doesn't really give too much away about what the story is going to be about. To me, the cover just looks like some spoilt child hiding in her room trying to spy on what's going on which has nothing to do with the actual story of the book!!

The world building is very believable. I could actually imagine everything written in the book happening as the author was writing about it. I had no qualms about the world building. The author brings this dystopian world to life beautifully and scarily so!

Unfortunately, the pacing was horrible in this book. I had to force myself to read it and finish it which is a shame because I really wanted to love The Uninvited. The story just went on too slowly for my liking. A lot of the time, I was contemplating giving up on this book, but I've read a lot of books that get better towards the end. However, this wasn't the case with this book. It never got any better. It was a slow read throughout.

The dialogue, to me, confused me. It featured a lot of science jargon that I didn't understand. I found myself completely lost through most of this book. The ending, especially, left me the most confused. I didn't understand why or how. I just felt it was never fully explained which left me feeling rather annoyed.

The characters just felt too one dimensional. I couldn't relate to any of them, and I didn't care what happened to them. The character of Hesketh just came across really annoying. Yes, I understand he has Asperger's but so does my son, and he's no where as annoying as Hesketh. (And I'm not just saying that because he's my son). Throughout the book, Hesketh repeats things to himself three times, and he's constantly talking about his origami. I realise that he has his little quirks, but I felt as if Hesketh's origami was being shoved down my throat. If I had to pick a favourite character, it was be Professor Whybray. He just had that lovely old man quality and came across feeling grandfatherly.

All in all, I think the idea of this story is a great one, but it was just poorly executed. The pacing was too slow, the characters were too dull, and the dialogue was just too confusing. Like I said, I really wanted to enjoy this book as Liz Jenson has written some wonderful books before this one.

I really wouldn't recommend this book, but if you'd like to give it a try, I'd say ages 16 would be the best ages to try to enjoy it.

I'd give The Uninvited by Liz Jensen a 1.5 out of 5.

(A special thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for giving me a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest and unbiased review).

[sasha · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

towards me, the book was very boring and had to skip to the end to get a bit of exitment ( literally )

[isabelx_21 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

So the question is, Heaven or Hell?’I say, ‘Pyjama Girl dreamed about a beautiful white desert that sparkled. She said it looked like Heaven.’‘If it is, it’s a salty one. What have you come up with on that front?’I glance at my notes. ‘The fact that salt’s been very dynamic of late. Salt levels in most oceans have increased dramatically over the last fifty years. But even more so in the last three or four. There are many countries that are reporting massive crystal deposits inland because much of the water table is salt-laden. Farmers have been battling it for years. It comes to the surface by capillary transport and when it evaporates, you have whole deserts of it. In South Australia there are already millions of hectares where nothing will grow. They call it the White Death.’Hesketh Lock, the protagonist of this story, is autistic, and obsessed with origami and paint colour charts. He is not lucky in love, having been recently dumped by his girlfriend Kaitlin who is refusing to let him see his much loved stepson Freddy. Hesketh's descriptions of his relationship with Freddy really made me warm to him, while his encounters with women made me laugh. On the other hand, he has done well in his professional life, finding a boss, who appreciates his talents and is prepared to help him with his social skills when he has problems in relating to people. Hesketh is an investigator for Phipps & Wexman, a company that tracks down whistleblowers so that they can be 'rewarded' by their employers. He is very good at his job due to a talent for seeing patterns in behaviour, because he isn't distracted by the emotions of the people he investigates.The story begins with Hesketh investigating a sudden outbreak of sabotage (his company's term for whistle blowing), in which loyal employees who love the companies they work for, deliberately sabotage them, seemingly against their will, and commit suicide soon after. At the same time there is an outbreak of violent attacks perpetrated by children under 10 on family members and Hesketh begins to see an overlap in the two, just as Phipps & Wexman are employed by the government to investigate the causes of the rapidly worsening situation alongside Hesketh's former mentor, Professor Whybray, who has come out of retirement because of the due to the crisis.The saboteurs claim to have been made to do it by child-sized spirits (trolls, djinns, etc depending on their culture) that have somehow got inside them. The children do not seem to be prone to suicide, but refuse to say why they attacked people they loved and don't seem to remember what they have done. While reading the book, I was wondering whether there would be a fantasy explanation with the trolls and djinns being real, or a psychological explanation with the collective unconscious breaking through, so the actual explanation for what happened came as a surprise. I quite liked the ending, with its note of optimism coming after so much devastation. Because Hesketh doesn't do wishful thinking, I believed him when he said there was hope for the future.

[jan0fleming · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A seven-year-old girl puts a nail gun to her grandmother’s neck and fires. An isolated incident, say the experts. The experts are wrong. Across the world, children are killing their families. Is violence contagious? As chilling murders by children grip the country, anthropologist Hesketh Lock has his own mystery to solve: a bizarre scandal in the Taiwan timber industry.

Hesketh has never been good at relationships: Asperger’s Syndrome has seen to that. But he does have a talent for spotting behavioural patterns and an outsider’s fascination with group dynamics. Nothing obvious connects Hesketh’s Asian case with the atrocities back home. Or with the increasingly odd behavior of his beloved stepson, Freddy. But when Hesketh’s Taiwan contact dies shockingly and more acts of sabotage and child violence sweep the globe, he is forced to acknowledge possibilities that defy the rational principles on which he has staked his life, his career, and, most devastatingly of all, his role as a father. Part psychological thriller, part dystopian nightmare, The Uninvited is a powerful and viscerally unsettling portrait of apocalypse in embryo.

Another entry under ‘dystopian’, my current favourite genre, this seriously creepy novel had me talking and thinking about it for days after I had finished it. Anthropologist Hesketh’s narrative voice is perfect for this. He is good at spotting patterns, calm and detached from all the hysteria and when it does get too much he indulges in a bit of mental origami. Perfect

The use of cultural mythologies (the ancestor spirits in Japan, trolls in Sweden, djinn in the Middle East) in the story was very well done and really intrigued me in the build-up when nobody really knows what is going on.

The ending has come in for some criticism but I thought it was perfect, I knew enough already to kow it would be bad!

[mimal_5 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

bookshelves: winter-20132014, under-1000-ratings, tbr-busting-2014, published-2012, britain-scotland, taiwan, recreational-homicide, casual-violence, mental-health, lifestyles-deathstyles, fraudio, britain-england, psychology, boo-scary, anthropology, mystery-thriller, sci-fi, dystopian, filthy-lucre, forest, mythology, religion, arran, sweden, trolls, fantasy, dubai, environmental-issues, suicide, little-green-men, cannibalismRead from July 01, 2012 to January 20, 2014Description: A seven-year-old girl puts a nail-gun to her grandmother's neck and fires. An isolated incident, say the experts. The experts are wrong. Across the world, children are killing their families. Is violence contagious?As chilling murders by children grip the country, anthropologist Hesketh Lock has his own mystery to solve: a bizarre scandal in the Taiwan timber industry. He has never been good at relationships. Asperger's Syndrome has seen to that. But he does have a talent for spotting behavioural patterns, and an outsider's fascination with group dynamics.Nothing obvious connects Hesketh's Southeast Asian case with the atrocities back home. Or with the increasingly odd behaviour of his beloved step-son, Freddy. But when his Taiwan contact dies shockingly, and more acts of sabotage and child violence sweep the globe, Hesketh is forced to make connections that defy the rational principles on which he has staked his life, his career and - most devastatingly of all - his role as a father.Part psychological thriller, part dystopian nightmare, The Uninvited is a powerful and viscerally unsettling portrait of apocalypse in embryo.Origami CraneOrigami Praying MantisOrigami Hermit CrabIn the Dubai gymnast leap sequence Tokoloshe was mentioned three times.From wiki: In Zulu mythology, Tokoloshe is a dwarf-like water sprite. It is considered a mischievous and evil spirit that can become invisible by drinking water. Tokoloshes are called upon by malevolent people to cause trouble for others. At its least harmful a tokoloshe can be used to scare children, but its power extends to causing illness and even death upon the victim. The way to get rid of him is to call in the n’anga (witch doctor), who has the power to banish him from the area.The children start forming a collective consciousness, show signs of arrested development and an addiction for salt.Hesketh narrates the first person action from an anthropological and autistic viewpoint and it works very well. In Wyndham's 'Midwich Cuckoos' the story is satisfactorily resolved (view spoiler), all tied up with bows; here was a somewhat wobbly ending as the author mounted her own environmental soapbox, her viewpoint working through the Professors notebooks and Hesketh's epiphany. Lost a star right there. It has been a while since I read The Rapture but I have a feeling the same thing happened there too. Time for a re-visit of that before I spend future money on habitual preachy endings.That said, 95% of this was very exciting and fresh.4* The Rapture4* The UninvitedTrivia: Liz Jensen is married to author Carsten Jensen:5* We, The Drowned3* I Have Seen the World BeginCrossposted:WordpressBooklikesLeafMarkLibrarythingaNobii

[iansales_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I am a Liz Jensen fan, although I don’t make as much of an effort to read her books as I should do. True, whenever I see one in a charity shop, I buy it. But, seriously, I should be buying her books new from a retailer – online or otherwise – because they are that good. Consider it a personal failing. In The Uninvited, the narrator, who suffers from Asperger’s, finds himself drawn into an investigation into children who have murdered their parents. And there seems to be an epidemic of such murders. In all cases, the children have no idea why they committed murder, and seem completely unaffected by their actions. Jensen never gives you quite what you expect – and that’s as true of this novel as it is of any of her others. The narrator’s condition is handled expertly, the circumstances of the deaths he investigates are presented convincingly, and the actual plot of the novel actually seems almost plausible. I’m not the only one with a failing here – we should all be reading Liz Jensen. And The Uninvited is as good a place to start as any.

[msbaba · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Hesketh, the main character in Liz Jensen’s newest novel, The Uninvited, is someone I don’t think I shall ever forget. I thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to get to know him through this book, and I can’t shake the feeling that he’s not just a literary character, but someone very real. Hesketh has Asperger’s. He has a Ph.D. in anthropology, an affinity for learning and speaking foreign languages, a life-long love for linguistics, and a passion for origami. Everyday life frequently over-stimulates him and he resolves these situations by folding origami figures compulsively in his mind. For pleasure, he reads about the latest advances in particle physics. Hesketh is the ultimate reliable narrator; it is impossible for him to tell a lie. His ex-wife calls him a meat robot, but readers will learn that he has a deep reservoir of humanity that makes him a better human being than most of the best without Asperger’s. He has some odd social behavior that is not uncommon to those on the autism spectrum…behavior that at times can be extremely humorous. Hesketh is a gem of a human just waiting for the reader to discover. If a fine author with very strong writing skills manages to deliver an extraordinary character study, then that would generally be enough to satisfy most literary readers. But what makes this book extraordinary is that this brilliant character study is enveloped in first-rate dystopian sci-fi thriller. I love dystopian fiction, but rarely get a chance to read it because it is hard for me to find authors that will hold my interest. This book grabbed me at the beginning, and didn’t let go until I’d quickly made my way to the end. For me, it was a high-octane literary and thinking-person’s thriller. The main character is employed as a Behavioral Patterns Expert for an international corporation with a sudden growing worldwide client-base seeking help resolving devastating and singularly unexplainable cases of insider sabotage. Hesketh is the analyst sent to figure out what is going on...to examine the chaos of seemingly unrelated facts surrounding each case and somehow find the underlying patterns that connect the dots, in short, to find out why. Simultaneously, the worldwide media attention is focused on a slow but growing phenomenon of preadolescent children violently attacking and killing their parents and other adult family members. Hesketh eventually sees a link between the two types of incidents: corporate sabotage and child murderers. It is a problem so big it threatens the collapse of the whole of global civilization. It is a force that can’t be stopped. Hesketh’s job eventually morphs into a singular focus: nurturing and saving his ex-stepchild, Freddy K. Through Hesketh’s love and care for Freddy K., we begin to understand the depths of humanity that often remain hidden behind the outward social awkwardness of Asperger’s. The Uninvited is a gem of a novel. Reading it makes me want to turn around and read all the author’s previous works…and I will.

[tomesofthesoul · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

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.

[bibliobeck · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Read and reviewed for Bloomsbury PressA really excellent read that kept me gripped throughout. The premise is a really interesting and very timely one regarding the way we treat our world. The idea of children becoming revenge-seeking automatons is a disturbing one and was really well played out in the book. The reader finds themselves gripped from the start as we read about a young girl in leafy Harrogate, ready for bed in her pretty butterfly pajamas who kills her grandmother with a nail-gun to the neck. It's a brutal beginning and certainly one that makes the reader want to read on. I particularly enjoyed the narration by Hesketh a man navigating his way through life with a brilliant academic mind and a deep misunderstanding of human relationships thanks to his Asperger's. "We are all liars bud. It's human nature'. No, I thought. He's wrong. Through a quirk of DNA, I am not part of that 'we'. I can get obsessive about things. Or sidetracked. I can appear brutal too, I'm told. But I know right from wrong. And I revere the truth. So you will at least find in me an honest narrator'.And we do. He is a brilliant choice for a narrator in that he is set slightly apart from the other characters who get swallowed by hysteria and anger at what is happening around them. In Hesketh we get a narrator who, whilst taking part in the action can also stand back and tell it like it is. His complicated relationship as an ex-almost-stepfather to Freddy filled the emotional gap and made Hesketh a totally realised character. His attempts to connect with people by making them gifts of complex origami was also very touching. Overall I enjoyed this much more than The Rapture as I felt the characters were more developed and the premise was well played out. Not much cheer in this dystopian nightmare, but a great read, recommended for those looking for a psychological thriller with teeth.

[lostinalibrary · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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 feral packs, eat bugs, and. in horrible acts of cannibalism, each other.The main protagonist of the story, Hesketh Lock, is hired to discover what is causing all of these strange occurrences. He has Asperger's which makes him the perfect observer since he can't engage emotionally, that is, until his own stepson begins to show the same bizarre symptoms as other children and soon the case becomes very personal even as the violence escalates.It is hard to classify this book. It seems to be an amalgam of several genres - dystopian, scifi, thriller, horror, and fantasy but whatever you call it, it makes for one hell of a scary read.

[jgoto_4 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

In Liz Jensen's novel, The Uninvited, alarming things begin to happen around the world. There are more and more incidents involving very young children killing their parents or caretakers. In the corporate world, loyal workers suddenly begin doing things to sabotage their companies and then kill themselves. Before their deaths, they claim that their actions were controlled by the "little people" who have taken over their bodies. Panic ensues as killer-child groups go feral and adults begin to fear and despise the young. Anthropologist and public relations man, Hesketh Lock, is charged with investigating the patterns to discover what is happening. I did not find the plot compelling. What did keep my interest in the book was the character of Hesketh. A thirty-six year old man with Asberger's Syndrome, he was not, as his ex-girlfriend called him, "a robot made from meat." The story is written in first person from Hesketh's point of view, and he clearly shows his feelings throughout the story. Though his reactions to events may not be typical, and his interactions with women seem far-fetched, Hesketh shows a clear love for Freddie, the young son of his former girlfriend. When Freddie begins to show symptoms of becoming one of the killer children, Hesketh does all in his power to protect and help him.I love the idea of a protagonist with Asberger's, and can understand that his unemotional reactions might make him an excellent anthropologist. I also enjoyed reading about his time spent with Freddie, and the conversations they had. All in all, however, Hesketh's personality alone was not enough to make the story a very interesting read.

[donnambr · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Hesketh Lock is an anthropologist with remarkable talents. He isn’t good with relationships but he’s incredibly good at spotting and analysing behavioural patterns. Therefore, when he’s called to investigate corporate cases of whistle-blowing in Taiwan and sabotage in Sweden, he’s looking for the individuals’ reasons for their actions. What he finds is something far more sinister, wide-reaching and difficult to analyse, as it seems that children across the world are embracing violence. Hesketh needs to rise above his natural inclination towards the logical, as the world around him becomes increasingly chaotic.The Uninvited is an incredibly compelling read. Originally it feels like a mystery to be solved but as things develop the novel takes on an almost apocalyptic feel, raising many questions about our approach to life, overpopulation, the damage we do as a species. Casting Hesketh in the role of the main character adds an extraordinary twist that prevents this from being ‘another dystopian novel with a sexy hero’. Hesketh is good looking, smart, intuitively analytical but he is not a typical hero. He has Asperger’s Syndrome and this means he is not intuitively emotive or able to pick up ‘people signals’ easily. That said, this is also the reason he is a remarkable character in many other ways, such as his ability to be rational. He is also a wonderful step-father, showing a real tenderness towards his step-son, even when he becomes violent. He is not ‘a robot made of meat’ – a phrase that comes up repeatedly throughout the novel, having being cruelly levelled at Hesketh by his ex.The Uninvited is wonderfully written with a great array of characters, situations and plot points. The ending was unexpected but touchingly satisfying. I read this in two sittings and enjoyed it immensely.

[myownwoman · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Supremely creepy! The children in this book are enough to give any parent pause. You know that when a book begins with a seven year old murdering her grandmother with a nail gun to the neck, you're in for an interesting read. The narrator, the autistic savant Hesketh, is empathetic to readers sensitive to his crippling logic and inability to relate to others emotionally. Beyond the horrorish/ science-fiction type plot line lies a touching tale of one man's love for his troubled stepson. The Uninvited is definitely an enthralling read recommended for fans of suspense, psychological thriller, horror and dystopian fiction.