Guest Review: The Fury

The Fury
Alexander Gordon Smith

Publisher: Faber and Faber

Imagine if one day, without warning, the entire human race turns against you.
Every single person you meet becomes a bloodthirsty, mindless savage, hell-bent on killing you – and only you.
Friends, family, even your mum and dad, will turn on you. They will murder you.And when they have, they will go back to their lives as if nothing has happened.
The world has the Fury.
It will not rest until you are dead.

Cal, Brick and Daisy are three ordinary teenagers whose lives suddenly take a terrifying turn for the worst. They begin to trigger a reaction in everybody they meet, one that makes friends and strangers alike turn rabid whenever they are close. One that makes people want to tear them to pieces. Cal and the other victims of the Fury – the ones that survive – manage to locate each other. But just when they think they have found a safe place to hide from the world, some of them begin to change...
They must fight to uncover the truth about the Fury before it's too late. But it is a truth that will destroy everything they know about life and death.

Hello all.  It’s been a while since I read a truly supernatural UF, and I’m wondering now what took me so long.  The premise behind The Fury is truly terrifying – what happened if during the course of a day, everyone you met, whether family, friend or stranger, turned into a feral animal intent only on killing you.  Once you are dead, they will walk away as if nothing happened, without the slightest recollection of their behaviour.

This story is at times wonderfully original, especially in a literary world chock full of vampires, werewolves and zombies.  Mel and I often comment that if those species were proved to exist, we would not be too perturbed, however I freely admit to feeling really on edge during the first third of this novel.  I simply could not imagine being in that situation, nor how I would cope.

The young and teenage characters are very real, and very flawed – the kind of kids you would find in any school.  They have to try to find a way to work together, no matter whether they’re the star of the football team, or a high school drop-out.  The way the teenage boys Cal and Brick in particular become so protective of the youngsters is very sweet and without cliché. 

However, the story does stagnate a bit in the middle, and that left me wondering whether Alexander Gordon Smith had added a bit of padding in order to get a second book out of the premise.  The sequel The Storm is due out very shortly, and I am hoping that I will be proved wrong.  

One for fans of James Dashner and Michael Grant, 8 out of 10.