The Silence

By: Tim Lebbon

Narrated by: Marisa Calin, Ralph Lister

Length: 11 hrs and 31 mins

Publisher's summary

In the darkness of a vast cave system, cut off from the world for millennia, blind creatures hunt by sound. Then there is light, there are voices, and they feed. Swarming from their prison, they multiply and thrive. To scream, even to whisper, is to summon death.

Deaf for many years, Ally knows how to live in silence. Now, it is her family's only chance of survival. They must leave their home, shun others, and find a remote haven where they can sit out the plague. But will it ever end? And what kind of world will be left?

©2015 Tim Lebbon (P)2018 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

I really am starting to question other reviewers

I don’t feel like I can trust the reviews I see on these audiobooks anymore, it seems the books with the best reviews , are books I can’t stand to listen to for more then 10 min. Either they don’t keep my attention, or it’s just slow. I can’t get into books that are slow from the start. I completely start to space out and then I end up rewinding 50 times. I.e. In Coldblood. That’s just an example of a book that had more 5 star reviews then most I have seen, however, I tried 7 -8 times to get 1/3 of the way through , and absolutely was bored to tears, not to mention confused with all the unnecessary people he gave life stories on , and their grandmas.

loved it

I'm on my third listen with The Silence. I like the two narrators, which I didn't think I would, but it breaks up the story from two perspectives. I enjoyed both narrators. I read the book on Kindle first and enjoyed it so much I wanted to listen to it as well. Not easy living in silence when the world was previously nothing but noise. I think the characters felt real and tell their story convincingly. Not every day creatures come from a cave to feast on any living thing that makes a sound. Great story from Tim Lebbon. You stay silent or you are silenced.

So much potential so little payoff

Look. I love apocalyptic stories. I love monster stories. I love British stuff.
So how can I end up rating this a 1 star?

Let's start with the readers. The guy is too "forcibly masculine" and the woman is so whimsical in her tone that it's just not believable.

Move on to the characters. The dad is sex obsessed (no really. Everything comes down to sex for him.). The mother is very underdeveloped and Jude can be summed up as "annoying little boy who pees and giggles".

The main character's deafness never really features in her narrative. She is able to describe things in terms of sound... Somehow. Her deafness is used more as a Prop than anything else.

The vesps are never remotely explained.

And apocalyptic? Ehhh... The characters never even lose the internet.

And all of this is honestly down to poor writing. This book is an exercise in "telling not showing" with a lot of passive language and limp narration. When things happen, it's interesting. But slogging through the prose is painful.

All of the character kills that happen as telegraphed well in advance. Usually by stressing how much they will help and how much they mean to the family or wondering how they will make it while keeping such and such character with the group.

They're dead within a few pages.

Strike two

This now is the second book by this author that I’ve lost interest in well before the midpoint. The books were included as part of my membership, so no credits were abused. How do you manage to make horror so boring? It is difficult to listen to banality in exhaustive detail meanwhile the horror element itself is soporific. In chapter nine a situation jumps off that makes this family look so stupid that I no longer care what happens to them afterwards. I give up on this one.

It has good & bad

This book was alright, I had to finish it just to see what happened in the end, but no solid finish. I seem to be hung up on loose ends but that is how books are ending so, I guess it is my problem. The book is told mainly in two points of view, it isn't hard to keep track of who is who, male and female. I remember seeing the movie first and like most books, it was better than the movie.
The story can drag a bit, but if you are engulfed in a story it gives you more details to focus on. A lot of my audiobooks end up on my put me to sleep list but, unless I listen to this a dozen or so more times this will stay off the list.

Unfortunately, Less Than What You Expect....

INITIAL THOUGHTS:

Alright friends, Audible and Goodreads friends,
I will try to remain as civil and non-harsh as I can for this. I was so excited for this book, because it is the exact kind of story that I LOVE. Post-apocalyptic. Scary Creatures. Horror. All the rest. I wanted to like this book so bad, and the beginning held so much promise.

SYNOPSIS:

The story goes back and forth between two different characters: Ally and Hugh. I can't remember if it says how old Ally is, but I would guess she's between the ages of 15 and 17. Huge is her father and is merely a middle aged man trying to protect his family. The story starts out with Ally watching a Discovery Channel documentary about a caving expedition happening in Moldova. Ally, from an accident when she was younger that killed her paternal grandparents, is now deaf in both ears, although she can speak. The channel is explaining how covers are going down into a cafe systems that has never ben gone into before this day. After dinner, Ally comes back up and, with utter horror, realizes that there are creatures flying out of the cave; these creatures, soon discovered, are blind, hunt only by sound, have some sort of radar that lets them fly without running into things, and are able to communicate when food is available.

Hugh, who is on a business trip, sees the same thing on television and believes that it is nothing more than a prank. After seeing a few people at breakfast the next day, acting as though this is something to be taken seriously, Hugh packs up that day and heads back to join his family.

After careful thinking and planning, Hugh decides that the best course of action is to go to his parents old house in Scotland, which is a remote and sparsely populated area. The rest of the book follows their journey to this area and what becomes one of the most nerve-racking the troublesome times of the family's life.

REVIEW:

POSITIVES: Tim Lebbon is a brilliant writer and I found him to be engaging and wonderful. His characters were drawn very well and I believed all of them to be dynamic and real. Ally, especially, was one of the most well-developed I saw in the entire book.
(There are more positives, but I want to get to what this book needs in the change department)

NEGATIVES: I found the storyline after they lost the vehicles to drag on so slowly that I wasn't very interested. Also, the Hushed, who follow The Reverend, could've been such a great tool to use to instill fear int he reader. Honestly, I found these characters to be "eh. There should've been more happening with them. And, Mr. Lebbon, come on--you know there was room for another one hundred pages AT LEAST! It ended so abruptly that I was like, "Wait, what? What happened? There could've been so much more--there was SO MUCH more story to tell and I'm so sad it didn't get done.

RATING:

The book will receive a solid B rating from me, because of how good the writing was. If the writing was sub-par or even just okay, it would probably get a C+ from me.

As far as Narration, Marisa Calin is a straight of A for me (5 Stars). She is such a gifted narrator and I will definitely be looking for other books she's participated in. With Ralph Lister, it's not that I hated him, but I didn't find him to be as engaging as Ms. Calin. He just didn't have the exact skill that I like in a narrator; For Mr. Lister, he will receive a B- from me, because he did a decent job, but it could've been better.

I guess read the book if you've read Lebbon before and like his style. I, personally, haven't gotten too much into him, but I think I might try to read on of his novelization of film books. Those can always be a fun read!

Terrific Apocalypse...

Really cool and emotionally driven snapshot of the beginning of a new and frightening world.

I'd had THE SILENCE on my radar for some time but hadn't pulled the trigger yet mostly because I just had so many books on my TBR list and something else seemed to be in front of it for some time. When the movie landed on Netflix, I had tentatively decided not to watch it until I had a chance to read the book. Well, my wife is a fan of horror and thriller movies, and enough people were buzzing about this one that I relented and we watched the movie. It was good. Very well made and had some great suspenseful scenes. It was inevitably being compared to A QUIET PLACE because of the similarity of theme, but I felt they were both very different stories that stood on their own, people can pick their favorites.

So, after seeing the film, I finished up a couple books I was reading and got THE SILENCE to read. VERY glad I did. The movie was good, the book is an instant classic. The family unit in the story and the shifting POV from the daughter to the father was a perfect approach to tell this frighteningly realistic take on a world overrun by monsters. The characters felt like a real family, people we care about, and they never once took a false step or did anything that seemed unreasonable or unrealistic to who they were. The dialogue was damn near perfect. And the pacing was a masterclass in building suspense.

By the end of the novel, I was grinning ear to ear. Nothing about the book knocked me out of my chair. There were no twists that came in and turned everything on its head and made my mind reel. It's not that kind of story. But what it shows is so frighteningly real and plausible, that I started looking around in the trees and powerlines for "vesps" perched and listening. THAT is how effective the story and the writing within this book was for me.

Excellent writing, great characters, and an all too plausible vision of an apocalyptic overrun of the world by creatures never meant to see the light of day. If any of that appeals to you, don't skip this one. If you're looking for a balls to the wall Mad Max style horror story, look elsewhere. This one scares you because it makes it all too real.

The narrators do a fantastic job. Each of them are people I'd listen to again in a heartbeat.

5/5, highly recommended. And I might even say this is one to check out in movie form first, which is never my normal recommendation. I feel like I'd have enjoyed the movie less had I read the book first. As it was, I was able to appreciate each one much more for the order I read them in.

Riveting

Good read, good pace but I dislike the ending and wish there was more to it.

Great concept, not so great execution

The plot was not as gripping as it should as it should have been, and the characters were mediocre and forgettable besides the main character, which I have to admit is rare.
However, half the book is narrated by a girl and then the other half by a man from a different characters point of view. Whenever the man was narrating, I wanted so badly to just skip it. Every scene. If the story would have been understandable without it, I would have done it without question. Besides the scenes he narrated being horribly boring and unappealing, his narration is horrible and the way he pauses so long and lowers his volume at the end of words makes it seem like the book stopped playing or the scene is over when in reality someone just finished a sentence. His volume is so inconsistent and goes from 100% to 5% in the most frustrating way.
I wish I could say the plot from this book made up for it, but it didn’t. Everything was lacking besides the narration by the woman.

Great story, didn’t love the narrator or the ending

This was such a great read. I was on the edge of my seat for most of it and I couldn’t put it down.

My only complaints are that 1) I would’ve liked a more put together ending and 2) I really disliked the male narrator. He has this inflection he used at the end of every sentence that just took me out of the read.

Had a great time overall though and I hope there is a part 2!