The Uninvited by Liz Jensen

First published in the UK in 2012; published by Bloomsbury USA on January 8, 2013 

Around the world, reports are surfacing of children killing their relatives for no apparent reason.  When a seven-year-old girl makes the news by shooting family members with a nail gun, Hesketh Lock views the story through the lens of an anthropologist, as “a parable of dysfunctional times.”  Perhaps that is the best way to read The Uninvited.

Many dystopian novels begin with the world in a dystopian state.  They may or may not explain how the world’s condition came about, but when they do, the explanation tends to be cursory.  The Uninvited takes a different approach.  The story begins in a normal world.  The reader watches as that world collapses.  The cause of the crisis, when it is finally revealed, is more imaginative than the zombie plague that has become the hallmark of apocalyptic fiction.

Hesketh is an isolated man, a sufferer of Asperger’s Syndrome.  He is a compulsively honest, concrete thinker who lacks people skills.  He managed to live with a woman for awhile but Kaitlin had an affair so his isolation is again complete, despite his desire to maintain a relationship with Freddy, Kaitlin’s seven-year-old son.  Hesketh works as a corporate troubleshooter, targeting anomalies in behavioral patterns in the workplace.  He undertakes a series of assignments involving corporate saboteurs in Taiwan, Sweden, and Dubai who, after contending that they were controlled by spirits or trolls or djinns, kill themselves.  Hesketh believes there has been a global outbreak of hysteria fed by indigenous superstitions, although he has trouble explaining why all the dead guys had developed cravings for salt.  Nor can he explain why, just before he watched a man plummet from the top of a building, he saw a little girl urging the man to jump.

I expected The Uninvited to be a conventional horror story.  It isn’t.  The Uninvited is a hybrid of the science fiction, horror, and mystery genres, but it is also a commentary on how society addresses disaffected children.  What is the real horror:  kids who kill or the tendency to forget that they are kids, to treat them as inhuman creatures?  Particularly unsettling, because it’s so close to reality, is the public’s willingness (as the crisis intensifies) to label children as terrorists, to concentrate them in camps and drug them, because a desire for safety trumps compassion and understanding.  The public will always prefer to act in ignorance rather than wait for knowledge if action instills an artificial sense of security.

Still, it isn’t necessary to read The Uninvited as a parable.  Taken at face value, it is an absorbing, nightmarish story.  I was pleasantly surprised by the elegance of Liz Jensen’s prose and by the depth of her characters.  Jensen exercises admirable restraint in her depiction of Hesketh.  Some writers would exaggerate his mental disorder to manufacture sympathy for the character.  Jensen is more subtle.  Hesketh is functional but a little off.  He’s keenly aware of numbers and time and colors and patterns.  He mentally constructs origami when he’s stressed.  Sometimes he rocks back and forth.  Jensen makes it clear that Hesketh is wired in an unusual way, but Hesketh likes the way he’s wired, enjoys the advantages that derive from his disorder (particularly his skill at pattern recognition), and scoffs when others pity him or assume he wants to be as “normal” as they are.  That’s an unusually insightful characterization of someone who would widely be pitied for his mental illness.

The Uninvited delivers a thought-provoking message but the message never overshadows the storytelling.  This is the way to write dystopian horror (and without a single vampire or zombie!). 

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