The aliens arrive in a great big mothership and things don't work out too good for us. Three waves of diabolically long-distance remote control mass slaughter later, and we're down to a handful of survivors who still aren't quite sure what hit them. Then the fourth wave comes along and starts picking off the survivors and setting things up for the fifth wave, which might seem like overkill, but as with any big cleaning job it's getting into those tight corners that takes ages.

Cassie Sullivan has lost most of her family except her brother, Sammy, and she's not really sure about him. She gets shot in the leg and stranded in the boot of a car during a blizzard and it seems like curtains for her until a strapping young farmer boy rescues her and takes her home. Meanwhile her old school crush is being indoctrinated into an army of children to strike back against the aliens, and the newest member of his squad is a kid called Sammy.

Horror and violence and death and destruction and more death and killing and death. That's what you get in the 5th Wave. It's grim stuff and the characters have to deal with grief and despair and PTSD by the barrelfull. But it's smoothly written, pacy as hell, undeniably exciting and compelling. There's troubling stuff there to do with the imagery of genocide and child soldiers and aliens-as-implacable-hostile-forces, and using these in a post-apocalyptic romp, but it doesn't feel particularly rompy, to be fair. There's hints of a developing love triangle of conflicted loyalities, but, I dunno, the whole thing seemed to work and I bombed through it, although I felt a bit wrung out by the end and not exactly up for another cheerful installment of happy funny puppy violence and genocide time just yet.