John Wyndham's "The Midwich Cuckoos"

While I was familiar with the screen versions of "Village of the Damned" (I haven't seen the original in its entirety, but I did see the fairly awful John Carpenter version from the mid-'90s), I didn't realize they were based on a John Wyndham book "The Midwich Cuckoos."

I read the book this week, and frankly thought it was not very good.  The concept of the story was interesting - an entire English village goes unconscious for a day, and anyone who tries to enter the village passes out as well.  Photos taken from above the village show some sort of UFO... or I suppose a UO, since it isn't actually flying, just sitting on the ground.  When the UO disappears (presumably becoming a UFO at that point), the town wakes up.  A few weeks later, all the women of childbearing age find out they are pregnant.

What spins out is a pretty standard invasion story (though not, I suppose, for the time in which it was written, the late '50s).  The children begin to show signs of being parts of a greater alien entity, they look all look alike, they have powers of mind control, etc.  When hurt, they lash out with extreme violence toward the people who hurt them, and eventually hold the village hostage.

It is discovered that this happened in a number of places around the world, and that each society acted against the children in a different way.

The book deals with the philosophical questions behind dealing with the unknown and alien, and whether a modern, democratic society can adequately combat a genuine threat like an alien invasion.

And that's the downfall of the book for me.  It is basically set up as a memoir, with one character Richard Gayford writing his reminiscences of the Midwich affair.  This leads to a fairly dry narrative in which events are described by the narrator, rather than experienced by the reader.  And the philosophical discussions, while interesting, brought what little action was in the book to a screeching halt.

I did like the idea of an alien made up of individuals with a group mind, and the children who were born through xenogenesis (with the biological mother really being little more than a host, and not sharing any genetic link with the offspring).  But overall, the book didn't really do much for me.


The Midwich Cuckoos (RosettaBooks into Film)