From the bestselling author of Netflix’s The Silence comes a brand-new horror eco thriller. Earth’s rising oceans contain enormous islands of refuse, the Amazon rainforest is all-but destroyed, and countless species edge towards extinction. Humanity’s last hope to save the planet lies with The Virgin Zones, thirteen vast areas of land off-limits to people and given back to nature.Dylan leads a … people and given back to nature.
Dylan leads a clandestine team of adventure racers, including his daughter Jenn, into Eden, the oldest of the Zones. Jenn carries a secret–Kat, Dylan’s wife who abandoned them both years ago, has entered Eden ahead of them. Jenn is determined to find her mother, but neither she nor the rest of their tight-knit team are prepared for what confronts them. Nature has returned to Eden in an elemental, primeval way. And here, nature is no longer humanity’s friend.
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Eden is a perfect torn-from-the-headlines biological thriller. Tim Lebbon mixes action, complex characters, and climate science into an absolute page-turner. This is why science fiction is so important! Highly recommended!
Eden by Tim Lebbon is a brutal survival story about a group of adventurers that try to cross a zone that they shouldn’t be in in the first place. The deeper they get, the more dangerous they realize this area is…
When we first meet the crew, we learn that they pride themselves on going to remote areas to test their abilities to race and beat other teams to accomplish certain feats.
Eden is something special. It’s an area of land that has been protected to give it back to the world with no more humans interfering. The borders are heavily guarded. Of course, this crew just can’t help but plan a trip to go in…
When they finally cross the border enter the zone itself, they feel that the area is a bit off. They also notice that it is far too quiet… But that doesn’t stop them. They very quickly begin their trek to cross the zone.
A couple days in, they start finding bodies. Soon, they realize that there was a lot more to fear than they originally thought.
Will they make it out, or will Eden claim them just like it has claimed the roads and buildings?
Phew, I hated all of these characters so very much. The author did an amazing job setting up the groundwork here. I totally understood the draw that the characters felt, but I was also so mad at these people for totally disregarding the rules and putting the whole area at risk.
So of course, when the area begins to fight back, I was rooting for Eden.
I don’t want to give too much away, so the last couple of things I will touch on are the scenes where they began to find bodies and the terrifying action scenes… My god were these scenes all extremely haunting. If you’ve read this book, you’ll know exactly what I am talking about. If you are going to read it soon, you’ll know what I mean when you hit each one. Good luck to you!
I really enjoyed this read and I thought it was interesting how much I sided with nature over the characters. I did find it a bit too repetitive for my taste in a few areas. However, this is a tale that I would very likely pick up again down the road to relive the terror!
This is a must read for fans of survival horror.
Smart, prescient and gripping, Tim Lebbon’s Eden takes us, and his team of adventurers, into the dark, pulsing heart of nature, and we all get far more than we bargained for. This near future eco-thriller puts Lebbon at the top of the tree. Read it. And then recycle.
Eden is a smart, thrilling, relentless, eco-nightmare that will worm its tendrils deep into you. Let your own ghost orchid grow.
Lebbon did an amazing job on his world-building in this novel. The setting and world of EDEN is something that I can very easily picture. Depressingly the human race is well on its way to creating this world. Anyway, the characters and their actions are also easy to picture and imagine others doing exactly what they did. That combination immediately means the book will be good and powerful.
The story: civilization finally realizes that it has impacted the Earth enough to be detrimental to continual survival. In a drastic effort to help, thirteen Virgin Zones are created where no humans can enter and Mother Nature can rule supreme. It’s now fifty years since the creation of the Virgin Zones and they are well-established. Dylan leads a team of adventure racers who are running through the different Virgin Zones; Eden is their latest goal. Jenn, Dylan’s daughter and part of his team of adventure racers, has a secret: Jenn’s mom and Dylan’s wife Kat who abandoned them both years previously entered Eden shortly before them. Now the team is on both a rescue trip and a race, running through a territory that is no longer friendly to humans.
Everything about the story made sense to me and worked nicely together. The hardest thing to believe was the running through the forest but considering people, Tim Lebbon included, run Iron Man races and even brutal Iron Man races, it’s really not that hard to believe. When people started dying, I was a bit surprised because it wasn’t the order that I expected. That was a good thing though. Not even close to a cliche. I’m not really sure what else to say except buy this book and read it. You’ll be happy. I would put this as my second favorite work by Lebbon, lagging only a very little behind “White”.
A timely tale of eco horror, Eden has an intriguing concept at its core. With trash-filled oceans, rising sea levels, Amazon deforestation, and skyrocketing extinction rates puting the Earth at risk, Tim Lebbon has imagined the establishment of Virgin Zones . . . where nature isn’t just thriving, but looking for revenge.
The Virgin Zones are vast areas of land, spread across the world, that have been given back to nature. Like something from Life After People or The World Without Us, they are post-apocalyptic landscapes reclaimed by nature, taking down buildings, chewing up roads, overgrowing cars and trucks, and erasing our footprint. Those who used to live in these Zones have been forcibly relocated, moved from their idyllic homes to slum-like apartments, adding to humanity’s woes while easing nature’s. With the Zones prime targets for illegal smugglers, poachers, and explorers, they are guarded by a militarized sort of United Nations, soldiers and mercenaries who are responsible for ensuring nobody gets in . . . and nobody gets out.
The first half of the book is character introduction, world building, and picturesque travelogue. It’s a fantastic read, full of exciting details. It serves to start building the tension, revealing hints and clues as to the darker aspects of the Zones. By the time Jenn, her father, and their team fend off their first attack, we’re already paranoid and curious, fully invested in whatever is happening around them.
The second half is pure survival horror, a crazed race through an unforgiving wilderness, stalked by shadowy beasts, with creepy evidence of nature’s war against humanity scattered throughout the Zone. It’s an everything that can go wrong will go wrong kind of scenario, one that just keep escalating the danger. I wasn’t sure where it was headed or how it could possibly end, but the climax is more than worthy of the tale that precedes it – and the (almost) final scene along the river is breathtaking.
The characters are engaging, with a nice dynamic and some growing tension as secrets are revealed, but it is Eden itself that is the real draw. The landscape and the story behind it are fantastic, and the evolution of nature within it is equal parts surreal plausibility and terrifying mythology. Definitely a can’t-put-down read.
With Eden, Tim Lebbon is at the top of his game. Action-packed, thought-provoking, terrifying, this is the eco horror novel by which all others will be judged.
Tim Lebbon gives us a near-future as terrifying as it is exhilarating, and — most frightening of all — irresistibly beautiful. Surrender to Eden.
An entertaining, gruesome story of endurance and survival in the last wild places on earth.
I can smell Eden, I can feel it, I can see it. But I want no part of it. Your senses will tingle and twitch as you journey through a forest of hellish life made real by Tim Lebbon’s rich prose and slick action sequences. You’ll be running behind the team right to the end, and then you’ll want to return to the start of the book to warn them — turn back. This is horror at its best, a terrifying nightmare of nature’s darkest depths ramped up to eleven, but also a love letter to adventure running, and to nature itself. Highly recommended.
Instantly cinematic. A textured, thought-provoking thriller that will make you wonder what the world would be like if humans were to give it back. Eden is a story about family, humanity and the desire to re-experience the wonders we screwed up the first time around. Nobody is as smooth on the lettered keys as Tim Lebbon. Here, as with all his books, you are in the hands of a master.
Eden is a first-rate, genre-bending thriller, a dark vision of a horrific future full of heartache and sinister atmosphere… Nobody tells stories like this better than Tim Lebbon.
Eden is both an eerie reimagining of our relationship with nature and a breathless page turning thriller. Tim Lebbon has created a vivid, wild world, filled with savagery and tenderness. It will haunt you.
A terrifying thrill ride into nature’s well-deserved revenge on humans, Eden is a chilling warning and a fast, hard read… today’s version of The Hot Zone.
Eden is visceral, cinematic and utterly wild, with a disorienting tone like Tarkovsky’s Stalker but with a far higher body count. It’s another terrifying yet irresistible novel from the effortlessly talented Tim Lebbon.
Eden is the ultimate adventure race turned nightmare, pitting the hubris of human nature against Nature itself, primal and emboldened and hostile. It’s a novel that could only have come from Tim Lebbon, melding a fiendish imagination with the heart of an endurance athlete… and a profound concern for the world we must all traverse.
Eden is both the darkest of fairy tales and an uncompromising, often gruelling account of adaptation and survival… A relentless page-turner in which the planet bites back!
Eden will intrigue, delight and thrill in equal measures. Another winner from Lebbon!
Tim Lebbon destroys the world like most of us put our socks on in the morning. But this is different. The catalyst of the story is hope. The hope that humanity survives, against the odds doled out by a planet that has its own plans for survival. Eden is Deliverance with the volume turned up to eleven. A breathtaking ride through the wild — the really wild — that would give Bear Grylls nightmares.
‘The Silence’ from Lebbon was my first experience with his writing and boy was it a treat. I still need to read ‘Coldbrook’ and his release with Christopher Golden ‘Blood of the Four,’ but when this was offered up for reviewers, I reached out and was kindly sent a PDF.
Tim’s a really nice guy, nice enough to have even let me interview him for my professional publication about his pursuit of running and Iron Man races. After reading his responses, the passion he has for distance endurance was evident, which makes the story in ‘Eden’ all that sweeter.
What I liked: I absolutely loved this book. We’ve frequently been introduced to post-apocalyptic landscapes or Man-vs-Nature storylines, but Lebbon added his own stamp on this with two particular plot lines. The first is the reclamation of large sections of Earth. The world governments banded together and in order to try and undo some of our destruction, they’ve designated areas that humans are not allowed to live in or enter. These are areas complete with ruthless border patrols and nature re-terraforming the cities. Each chapter was started with a snippet from a diary/journal/book etc talking about how this occurred and what resulted because of it. I would love to read more about these zones in the future.
I really loved the cast of characters Lebbon assembled, which brings me back to the second plotline. The endurance runners trying to set a zone crossing record. I loved that. It showed why this mixed bag of people regrouped time and again and why Dylan, the leader and father of one of the runners, was so focused on the task at hand, even as things began to go south. Returning to what I mentioned earlier about Lebbon’s love of endurance running, this shined through and I found that little nuances that only someone who had spent years training and prepping for this time of competition would think of, like the carrying of supplies etc.
Lastly, Eden itself is spectacular. The scope is massive, impressive and for me reading, absolutely claustrophobic. I’ve always said I’m scared to death of the forest, much like people are with deep water. We can only see so far into the trees, into the darkness of the water – it’s what lurks just beyond what we can see that we need to be worried about. Lebbon delivers some fantastic twists and as Eden unfolds, and begins to show exactly what it has planned for our group of explorers, Tim goes full out with letting his imagination take over. Well done.
What I didn’t like: There was only once aspect to this that I felt a bit unnecessary – the random chapters from Jenn’s mom. Whenever I would end a chapter and then a chapter from Kay started, I personally didn’t find it added much to the story, or much on top of what was already being delivered. Saying that, others may very well like them and they do serve a purpose.
Why you should buy this: There’s a reason this book is on so many “most-anticipated” lists. It bristles with emotion. This is Lebbon doing a better version of a Jon Krakauer survival book. If you followed my progress on Goodreads, you’ll see that it actually took me a long time to read this. That was purely due to my copy being a PDF. I knew what I was getting into when I accepted it, so it took me a bit longer. I know for a fact if I had a mobi review copy, I would have read this in three sittings. This book is just so outstanding and Tim did a marvellous job of creating real characters, an amazing reason for them to be together and a simply stunning way to retell or recreate the “Man-vs-Nature” storyline.
This is a must-read.