Horror, sci-fi, whatever you want to call it, but the main point to know about The Uninvited is that it's all supposedly true. In the 1970s, Broadhaven in Wales became a place for several UFO sightings. In addition to schoolchildren seeing an alien dressed in a silver suit, the Coombs family encountered several unexplained phenomena (teleporting cows, constantly breaking cars and televisions, strange lights etc.). Well, unexplained until years after the publication of The Uninvited several people came forward and claimed some of it was just a hoax. You don't say?

This is one of those cases (rare ones, thankfully) where I was blinded by all the good reviews and the deceptively interesting blurb. What made me even have a strong gut feeling about this is baffling, because UFOs aren't really my thing. I may have a mild interest for the 1940s UFO incident, but that's mainly because I love history, strange things, and I want to visit Roswell sometime (you know, all the fun alien lamp posts and signs etc.). Even in The X-Files, almost all my favorite episodes are monster-of-the-week.

Harold is a completely adequate writer and the book as a whole isn't bad per se, but it's very dull. The sightings follow one after another. There's no real story in this monotony, because we just follow the family and their daily lives with some extra-terrestrials in the mix. Usually my gut feeling is right, but I should probably re-calibrate it when buying vintage horror paperbacks.