Book Review: The Change: Orbital / Author: Guy Adams / Publisher: Endeaver Press / Release Date: Out Now (eBook only)

You may have known that novelist Guy Adams has The Army Of Doctor Moreau out, and you may have known about his new Sherlock behind-the-scenes book, but odds are good that you probably didn’t know about his new eBook, The Change.

Ah yes, the Change. Taking place over a period of four minutes, it sees the world running riot with Lovecraftian nightmares (actually, to refer to them as Lovecraftian nightmares is a bit of a misnomer – they really should be nightmares for any normal person as well). Once the Change is over, people just try and get by. Naturally, the best way to do this is to take to motorbikes and colonise the M25 (now referred to as The Perimeter, a detail easily missed on the first read) and the service stations that run along it.

We are introduced to this world through the eyes of an amnesiac named Howard Philips (named in honour of the master of horror himself – although it’s not entirely clear if that is actually his name), who has to deal with crazed birds, tentacle monstrosities made flesh with his thoughts and premonitions of what’s to come.

At 95 pages, this isn’t exactly an epic doorstopper book on the scale of Lord Of The Rings, the Harry Potter series or The Dilbert Principle, but Adams doesn’t need a huge page count. With this book, he’s proven that he can craft a tale on the same par as his other excellent books.

Thank God this is the first of an ongoing series, because one thing this book does is throw up a lot of questions. How did the Change happen? What’s London got to do with it? Who was Howard Philips before the Change? And why, in the name of Lovecraft, are finned dogs hunting in the Thames? We can’t wait to find out.