A scientific expedition ventures into a vast network of Moldovan caves that have been sealed in isolation for millions of years. This allows the escape of a flying predator that locates its prey through sound, in batlike fashion. They take a liking to people (in the dietary sense).
Liberated from the thinned air and limited food supply of their chthonic ecosystem, the ''Vesps'', as they are named, engage in a runaway feed and breed cycle above ground, numbers multiplying as they sweep across continental Europe.
The two narrators are family members living in the south of the United Kingdom. Ally is a teenager who is deaf due to a childhood car accident. Her father Huw is reliable and decent, but consumed with fears for the safety of his two children. In the days following the Vesp outbreak, they realise the danger and travel north to escape.
It is a nightmare caricature of the family holiday roadtrip: mum, dad and the kids (plus dying mother in law and the shotgun wielding best mate of Huw) pile into their vehicles and head for a distant childhood holiday home in remote Scotland, to hide out and avoid consumption.
The encroaching doom of the Vesps is nothing compared to the menace of humans in the midst of social disintegration. Roadside toilet stops turn into armed carjackings by feral fellow refugees. The motorways are clogged with burning vehicles. Ally follows the apocalypse on her iPad.
The Vesps are a reflection of modern paranoias, drilling right down through to the ground floor of ancient terrors. Humanity has disrupted a natural order, and is afflicted by a viral contagion, an ecological cancer, a plague of zombiefied flying piranhas.
The bustle of urban society attracts the carnivorous flocks with their mindless appetites. The city becomes a trap. Other people become a trap. Safety can only be found in isolation - or silence.
Ally's deafness means the family can converse in sign language, thus providing them with an advantage in a world where noise means death.
The institutions of government, the corporate media and the conventional military are all paralysed by the assymetrical interspecies warfare of these reptilian terrorists that cross borders with ease.
Any useful information about the threat is spread through ''Arab Spring'' style social networking: live streamed video, citizen bloggers, Facebook posts, tweets, text messages.
As is the way with much horror writing, the political subtext is conservative. As the thin skin of social convention is torn away, all that is left is the family. Life returns in a matter of days to a state of ''nasty, brutish and short''.
Survival in the moment trumps more complex evolutionary behaviours of altruism or trust. The Silence is a taut, sharp and chilling novel, successfully interbreeding its classic horror effect with the current mood of digitally enhanced paranoia, vulnerability and crisis.
Victor Billot is editor of The Maritimes, the magazine of the Maritime Union.
