Musings of Two Creative Minds

  MY RATING:  5  STARS OUT OF 5 I was very excited to finally get my hands on a copy of this book after seeing the 1960 movie "Village of the Damned" that was made based upon it. My wait was not in vain. While the movie followed the storyline and even small details very faithfully, actually reading the story was much more fulfilling. I can understand the changing of the title, since not many are all that familiar with cuckoos aside from cuckoo clocks. In real life, cuckoo birds are rather parasitic in their behavior. A mother cuckoo will lay her egg in the nest of another bird (who is not a cuckoo) and leave it among the other eggs already there, and take off. The cuckoo's egg will usually be similar in size and coloring so the foster-mother will not notice the additional egg and will care for it. Unfortunately, the cuckoo egg will hatch way before the other eggs, producing a very demanding chick who will constantly want to be fed and cared for. While the foste...

I've wanted to read this book for some time. And as I expected it was quite different from the movie from 1962. I was a little surprised to see that most of the story seemed to focus on a post-apocalyptic Earth situation, where the Triffids were just another danger.  But I was fascinated by the behavior of the people our protagonist meets along the way. The good, the bad and the ugly do not really apply in this case. It was more the well-meaning, the determined, the foolhardy. Truly an insightful look at how people might behave and react to a world were 99% of the people have gone blind. How do you come to grips with the realization that so many people need help and you can only do so much?  I rather liked the author's use of the 1st person narration in this story as well.  He keeps in mind that the protagonist will only know so much and thus will only be able to share that information with the reader.  For most of the book the source of the comet-light show that...