By Tom Bale

Audible, out now

A helicopter crash leads to a village under siege…

There’s always something a little disconcerting about any story that’s set in your own locality, and Tom Bale’s story is set in a village not that dissimilar to the one I can see from my office window. Bale knows Sussex and the Sussex way of life, and he uses his talents for description to good effect in his depiction of the sometimes insular ways – there’s hints of John Wyndham in the way he approaches it, but he puts his own stamp on it.

Teenagers helping an alien escape from the authorities isn’t exactly a new idea (it wasn’t even when Spielberg used it in ET!) but as with Stranger Things – something which this has inevitably been compared with – it’s the way in which the various tropes are approached that make it work. You don’t want to be spoiled for the various twists in the plot – there are a few that, no matter how much you’re steeped in the genre, you may not see coming.

Verdict: Well told by Raza Jeffrey, this is an intriguing take on familiar tropes that perhaps skews more towards Young Adult. 7/10

Paul Simpson