Matthew’s parents are worried. At eleven, he’s much too old to have an imaginary friend, yet they find him talking to and arguing with a presence that even he admits is not physically there. This presence – Chocky – causes Matthew to ask difficult questions and say startling things: he speaks of complex mathematics and mocks human progress. Then, when Matthew does something incredible, it seems there is more than the imaginary about Chocky. Which is when others become interested and ask questions of their own: who is Chocky? And what could it want with an eleven-year-old boy?
A story of innocence and alien contact, John Wyndham’s CHOCKY is a sinister tale of manipulation and experimentation from afar.
“CHOCKY, the last novel published during Wyndham’s life, is a playful investigation of what being human is all about, delving into such matters as child-rearing, marriage, learning, artistic inspiration—and it ends with a surprising and impassioned plea for better human stewardship of the earth.” NYRB
“What John Wyndham does so brilliantly is invest quiet suburban streets with menace. The idea of an alien intelligence inhabiting a child is always frightening. But here Wyndham turns a story of ‘possession’ into a touching fable about our profligate use of the planet.” Telegraph
“Wyndham singlehandedly invented a whole pile of sub-genres of SF. It’s as if… in the 1950s he was plugged in to the world’s subconscious fears and articulated them one by one in short, amazingly readable novels.” Jo Walton, Tor.com
