{Review and Author Q&A} We Hear Voices by Evie Green (@Emily_Barr @BerkleyPub)

An eerie horror debut about a little boy who recovers from a mysterious pandemic and inherits an imaginary friend who makes him do violent things...

Kids have imaginary friends. Rachel knows this. So when her young son, Billy, miraculously recovers from a horrible flu that has proven fatal for many, she thinks nothing of Delfy, his new invisible friend. After all, her family is healthy and that's all that matters.

But soon Delfy is telling Billy what to do, and the boy is acting up and lashing out in ways he never has before. As Delfy's influence is growing stranger and more sinister by the day, and rising tensions threaten to tear Rachel's family apart, she clings to one purpose: to protect her children at any cost--even from themselves.

We Hear Voices is a mischievously gripping near-future horror novel that tests the fragility of family and the terrifying gray area between fear and love.

​Even though Evie Green penned We Hear Voices before the outbreak of COVID-19, the parallels are unmistakable and chilling.   
 
It follows the life of Rachel Jackman – a mother of three living in London.  She’s trying to make a home for her family in a city where big corporations control almost every aspect of life.  She gave up a successful career as an attorney to take care of her children and would do anything in her power to make sure they were safe.
 
So when the deadly J5X virus that is ravaging the outside world sinks its wicked claws into her six-year-old son, there’s absolutely nothing she won’t do to save him.

Billy was so pale that his face was a bluish green color. His hair was slicked back with sweat. His temperature soared while he shivered. She waited for the next breath. When it didn’t come, she pulled him tighter against her chest, trying to use her heart to jump-start his.

“Billy,” she whispered into his hair. “Billy, it’s Mum. Stay. Stay with me.” She looked up, her child in her arms. “Universe,” she muttered. “God,” she added, hedging her bets. “Allah. Whoever you are. Give me Billy back. Give me my Billy, and I promise I will do anything. I’ll sell my soul to anyone. Let me keep him.”

Nothing changed.

Millions of people had died. Billy would add one to the number of casualties. Children under ten were particularly at risk. Plus one for the children-under-ten statistics.

“Please,” she said. She kissed his head one more time. One more. One more. “I love you, Billy.” She pushed her face into his and rubbed her warm cheek on his cooling one and tried to imagine her life without him.
 
He wasn’t moving. He wasn’t breathing. He had…

“Let me keep him,” she said. “I don’t care what else. Let me have Billy.” 

His body jerked in her arms, and he opened his eyes, just a fraction. She felt his lungs expand. She heard him exhale, felt the sour breath on her face. He inhaled again with a rattling noise, a vibration. He was breathing.

​Billy is miraculously spared and seems to recover fully with the help of his new imaginary friend.   Everyone believes that “Delfy” is completely harmless – until the unthinkable happens. 
 
Rachel must once again fight for Billy’s life and she never gives up - not even when the odds seem insurmountable.  It’s this strength of spirit that inspired me to devour page after suspenseful page of this thought-provoking stunner…

A Q&A With Evie Green ~ 

Tell us about WE HEAR VOICES. What inspired you to write this story?

Many years ago, when I was about 9 or 10, I read a book by John Wyndham, called Chocky. It’s about a boy with a voice in his head, told from the point of view of his baffled father. A few years ago, I found a copy of it in a second hand bookshop, so I read it again and could not get the ideas it sparked off out of my head. I started writing without really knowing what was going to happen, and many years later, WE HEAR VOICES is the result.

This is your first horror novel. What drew you to write in the genre?

Funnily enough, I never set out to write a horror novel! I wrote the book that was in my head, and I
suppose it went through a few gears, from thriller to speculative fiction, then sci fi, and finally to horror. Genre is a strange thing! Also, its first draft didn’t have a pandemic in it. I added it in as a bit of exciting background, with absolutely no idea of how relevant that aspect would become. It did mean I was well up to speed with face masks and so on by the time COVID-19 came along.

Your story is about a boy with a dangerous imaginary friend, but also about a family, and how that family copes in the aftermath of challenging times. Why did you choose to incorporate such a strong family storyline into your novel?

WE HEAR VOICES is a family novel before all else. I have three teenage children, and two stepchildren, so my family is at the heart of all I do, and I’m really interested in the immediacy of questions like how far you would go to protect your child. One of the protagonists, Nina, is a teenage girl, and in a way she’s a lot like my eldest child, in that she’s more sensible than most of the adults around her! I think that teenagers have an undeserved bad reputation: I love having them around, and always really enjoy meeting their friends. In my other life I write YA fiction, so I’ve got a great affection for good teenage character, and wanted Nina to be as much a part of the plot as her mother. However, Rachel is really at the centre of it all.
She’s had her own struggles in the past, and has to contend with a desperately ill child, a pandemic, dealing with her ex-husband, and then death and destruction at the hands of her own possessed child. She could easily fall apart, but she manages to hang on most of the time.

What kind of research was required before writing WE HEAR VOICES?

As space travel is a part of the book, I spoke to an old university friend, Kevin Fong, who’s now an expert on the human body in space as well as a medical doctor and astrophysicist! During the course of our conversation, we also talked about pandemics, and he said that the number one worry of governments worldwide is a pandemic, and that one would happen sooner or later. We had absolutely no idea at that point that there was one approaching. I was mainly after his expertise on space colonisation, however, and took the information he gave me and ran with it, fictionally. My brother is an epidemiologist, so I also got some advice from him, though the pandemic itself is just ending at the start of the book. I considered whether the WE HEAR VOICES world would have had a full lockdown and decided that itwouldn’t, for economic reasons, so they have rules about facemasks and so on, but the virus has mainly been left to sweep though the population.

What do you hope readers will take away from your novel?
​
The one thing that didn’t change through the many drafts of this novel was the ending: I’ve always wanted it to end with a shock (as I like reading books like that) so I hope that’s enjoyable. In a broader sense, I suppose I’d like them to think about family, about the questions of how far you defend your child if they do something indefensible, and what on earth a parent can do if they feel their child is out of control. Child mental health is a huge problem worldwide at the moment, and it has huge ramifications for the future.

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