BOOK REVIEW | VEIL | JOHNATHAN JANZ

 

ABOUT THE BOOK

It begins at night. People vanish from parks and city streets. Then in broad daylight, they’re dragged screaming into the woods, into the water, into the sky. People take refuge in their homes, but still the invisible creatures come, ripping people away from their horrorstruck loved ones. Spouses. Parents. Children. Nowhere is safe and no defense can stop them. Because nothing can save you from what you can’t see.

High school teacher John Calhoun loses his son the first night. A day later, they take his wife. For two months, he and his thirteen-year-old daughter manage to survive, but in the end, she is abducted too. In John’s darkest moment, he meets a motley group of survivors who have a secret: a near-fatal car accident has given one of them the ability to detect what normal human eyesight cannot.

The survivors believe they can replicate the brain injury that will enable them to see the creatures. To discover how they’re invading our world. To fight them. Desperate to save his family, John volunteers. And after the veil of invisibility is lifted, he and his new friends will risk everything to achieve the impossible: enter an alien world and bring their loved ones back.

REVIEW

John Calhoun is a Dad who is having a bad day. His wife recently left him and his teenage son is pushing the boundaries. John knows that his son is taking advantage of the situation, but realises when his son makes a request that he knows he shouldn’t give in, leading to his son telling him that he should lighten up and stop being a stick in the mud. 

Walking through the University campus where John works as a teacher, he doesn’t know that his bad day is going to get worse. As they stop outside a shop John takes his eyes away from his son for just a moment. When he looks back, he’s gone. Vanished into the who knows where. 

As time moves on, more and more people begin to disappear. First in darkness, then in broad daylight, in their homes. No one is safe. It’s not long before John’s whole family have been taken.

When he comes upon a ragtag group of survivors, they think they have a solution. This leads them to go to the terrifying world of the aliens to bring their loved ones back.

Alien Invasion books have been a well used trope now for over a hundred years or so. Since HG Well’s terrifying Martians came to earth to decimate the population and use the earth as a Martian version of McDonalds. In light of that, how do you make your book stand out amongst the dearth of similar stories?

Well, if you are Johnathan Janz, it’s easy. What you do is lean heavily into the trope and fill it with characters that readers will love. That’s how!

In Veil, Janz doesn’t break the wheel in trying to reinvent or subvert the genre, he just writes a good story and uses all the things that make these kinds of stories so good. He has a main protagonist that is decent and strong. Yes, he isn’t perfect, but he tries his damned hardest. Then he surrounds his main character with a good (and reprehensibly bad) cast of side characters, couples it with a gripping plot and finally peppers the story with some brilliant set pieces.

Veil is a gripping story of a man’s fight against adversity to rescue the ones he loves that has both heart and a good dash of gore.