This is a novel of tomorrow — a most original, exciting, and menacing one. It uses no props, such as space or time travel, or super-gadgets or men, to achieve its chilling effects. It is about ordinary, likeable people in a familiar setting who have to put aside all their civilized values and think of self-survival only. So the reader will find people in this book who are treacherous, who plunder, who murder, just as he himself might be compelled to do in the same circumstances. The story opens leisurely with loving detail about England’s green and pleasant land. The reader has ample time to know and like the characters, and the author holds back most skillfully his knowledge of the horrors to come. The reader is asked, as it were, to come for a gay sleigh ride with the characters, and at first the slope is gentle and inviting. But almost immediately, to right and left, the look of the land is changing, and all of a sudden he will find himself, breathless with excitement, racing down a dangerous hill at top speed, facing disaster at every turn or curve. Not only will the landscape but the characters with whom he rides reshape themselves under his eyes, and there is no knowing, until the final moment, whether the end will be a total wreck or a safe slowing-down in a land where the grass once more grows green. Quite intentionally, this jacket description has made no attempt to give you any idea of the plot. That is because the page-to-page pull of this absorbing novel is one of its chief virtues, and it would be unfair, both to you and the author, to destroy any of it.
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