I don’t know exactly what first drew my attention to Night of the Big Heat (1959), by John Lymington. I suspect I was browsing through some Wikipedia posts about alien invasion movies, and caught sight of the 1967 film adaptation of the book, which starred none other than Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, and that drew me to the novel. In any case, I bought a copy well over a year ago and just now finally decided to give it a look!

I really didn’t have high hopes for it when I read it, but this alien invasion story is surprisingly fun, and filled with clever ideas!

The novel is set on an unnamed British island in the midst of an unprecedented, and apparently global, heatwave. People feel that there’s something unnatural about it, and have wildly speculated that it might have to do with all of the atomic bomb tests going on, but nobody has any real idea of what has caused the heat or when it may let up.

On the island, novelist and pub owner Richard Callum struggles to get work done and focus under the oppressive temperatures. A secretary named Patricia Wells arrives to help him edit his book, and almost immediately the two find themselves attracted to each other, in spite of the fact that Richard is happily married to Frankie. Are these desires just a side effect of the heat, or something else?

We meet more of the locals as they frequent Richard’s pub, the White Lion. This includes an airman from a local radar station, who confides in Richard that there seems to be some sort of inexplicable radio signal being beamed downwards onto the island, as well as a curious stranger named Harsen who keeps to himself and seems to be doing something strange in his rented room. When another patron reveals that Bob Franker claimed to have recently seen a flying saucer and some creatures looking like spiders emerging from it, Richard, Patricia and Frankie start to suspect that something sinister and out of this world is happening on the island. They contact Vernon Stone, a science fiction author who also lives nearby, and the group of them conclude that aliens are beaming themselves to Earth for an invasion, just as messages are beamed by radio from one place to another. And the aliens give off tremendous heat. Soon, those people assembled at the pub barricade themselves inside to survive the night, and struggle to get a message out to warn authorities of the threat to the planet…

Night of the Big Heat starts slow, but builds up an impressive amount of tension as it develops. It reminds me in a sense of Night of the Living Dead (1968), in which an eclectic group find themselves barricaded in a house against the throngs of undead outside. In Big Heat, the undead are replaced by large spider-like aliens that radiate massive heat and can potentially kill with a grasp. To Lymington’s credit, he never gives a very clear description of the creatures, and we only get second-hand accounts and dim glimpses in the dark of night. This is very much keeping with the classic horror rule that an unseen monster is far scarier than one that is seen!

There is plenty of fun science fiction to chew on, as well. Initial speculation by the pub patrons is that aliens are attacking Earth with a heat ray. However, as they go on, they instead believe that aliens are being beamed to the island, and that this could be responsible for the heat as a side effect. The aliens themselves are super-hot likely due to residual radiation created by the transfer process. And what are these aliens? Though at first they are thought to be an intelligent race, it is later decided that the aliens have sent vicious mindless animals in advance, much as humans sent monkeys up into space to determine if it is safe. If the animals survive in Earth’s climate, then the intelligent aliens can follow in their wake. It is thought that the alien intelligence may be a race of insect-like beings, as insects seem to have evolutionary advantages on Earth and may eventually overwhelm us; why might not a similar thing have happened already on another world?

There are a number of delightfully tense scenes. The best is when one of the pub patrons volunteers to head to the largest town on the island to seek help from the police. He travels by car, and brings along a radio transmitter so he can report back live to the pub, and his communiques are wonderfully eerie and tense. (Thinking of the movie Alien, imagine Dallas wandering the ventilation ducts in pursuit of the alien.)

The novel is short — my later edition copy is only 120 pages! You might wonder how an alien invasion story could possibly be sorted out in so short a book, and the answer, without going into too much detail, is a deus ex machina type resolution of the War of the World type. It brings the book to a satisfying conclusion, however, and my view is the book is more about the tension of being in the midst of an alien invasion than it is about the invasion itself.

Overall, I had a lot of fun reading this book! It was John Lymington‘s first science fiction novel, and he wrote many more. I’m going to hunt down a few others to see what they’re like in the near future.

The movie version of Night of the Big Heat can be watched for free on YouTube (unauthorized). Here it is in case anyone wants to check it out: