EDEN / AUTHOR: TIM LEBBON / PUBLISHER: TITAN / RELEASE DATE: APRIL 7TH

Nature and nurture join forces and turn on a group of wily, well-equipped adventurists voyaging through a largely uncharted jungle ‘Virgin Zone’ in Tim Lebbon’s heart-quickening new horror thriller. The prolific Lebbon is usually more inclined to wipe mankind out altogether – his 2015 page turner The Silence is probably still his most compelling work – but in Eden it’s the unpredictability of Nature that’s the threat, the book implicitly warning us that we damage the ecosystem at our own risk and that we mustn’t expect that same eco-system to not fight back with whatever strange, unknowable forces it has at its disposable.

Land has been given over and back to Nature, Man has retreated and thirteen vast tracts of land all over the world are designated as ‘off-limits’ to humanity in an attempt to create massive green zones that can eventually become established as the ‘lungs’ of the over-exploited planet. But, of course, humankind can never really leave things alone and daredevils and thrill-seekers are regularly smuggled into the Zones determined to cross the unpredictable wildernesses purely for the hell of it. But few return and those who do speak of incredible creatures and unspeakable horrors. Seven – it’s always seven – experienced explorers penetrate the wild Virgin Zone known as Eden and most of them do so for reasons they have chosen to keep secret from the others. Expedition leader Dylan and his daughter Jenn have come to Eden to find Dylan’s estranged wife Katt who vanished in the Zone months before but unbeknownst to Dylan Jenn has been in secret contact with her mother who herself had a terrible personal secret. The team travel good-naturedly and assuredly into Eden for the first day or so… but it soon becomes obvious that Eden – and very probably the other Zones – is like nowhere else on Earth. Nature has consumed and subsumed the landscape in ways beyond their imaginings and it’s not long before they are under attack by Eden itself, its unusually hostile fauna and a form of life and existence that they can’t begin to comprehend.

Eden – like the jungles and forests which it depicts – is a dense and demanding read. The first few chapters, establishing the characters and their various personality quirks and motivations, are a bit of a slog but once the group are alone in Eden, the tension and edginess starts to crank up as they discover its strange, often horrific secrets and, eventually, the unearthly truth about Katt’s fate. Lebbon’s writing, as ever, is bold and pacey, his descriptions of Eden’s terrain vivid and colourful. But he really excels in the book’s numerous breathless action set pieces as the group, eventually separated from their equipment and their resources, have to fight to stay alive with whatever weapon they can fashion out of the debris left behind from man’s retreat, as strange, hungry forces close in around them in the dark and Eden enfolds them in its ruthless, invasive embrace.

Fans of Lost World-style adventure stories will find much to enjoy in Lebbon’s unsettling story of humanity venturing into places it’s not welcome but there’s more going on here than just running, screaming and dying. It never hurts to be reminded that we live on this planet because the planet allows us to; in increasingly uncertain times we can’t help but wonder now and again if we’ve outstayed our welcome and if nature itself is starting to regard us as a nuisance and an anachronism. Eden will thrill you and it will make you shiver… but it might also make you think…