Sci fi thriller takes taut story – and the climax – to Ullapool

Alien showdown in Ullapool as pregnant Ava comments near the start of Doug Johnstone’s heart-pounding sci-fi thriller The Space Between Us – “You can learn to live with anything.”

Even aliens.

Coercively-controlled Ava, bullied schoolboy Lennox and terminally ill Heather don’t have their troubles to seek already when something strange happens to unite them one night just outside Edinburgh, in this week’s Star Read.

For them it’s the beginning of a scenario most of us have dreamed of – what if aliens come calling one dour Scottish night and change everything we understand about ourselves and the universe?

In short pacy chapters, Doug Johnstone shifts us between the three different characters as the fast-unfolding story quickly brings them together because of the actions of an alien with a plural identity who Lennox names Sandy.

The almost instant bond that forms between the humans after their first contact is a kneejerk reaction to realising they are the only ones who can help Sandy as the authorities circle. Johnstone delights in the wonder that is his alien, a plausibly different being in an inspired mash-up of imagination and science.

This is a contemporary world and with the almost redundant skills of an old-school journalist Ewan too is caught up in their story to make the rescuers a foursome and the group’s individual stories offer fertile ground for writer Doug Johnstone’s asides on modern life and what we’ve learned to call our broken society.

But that barely has time to register, as an out-of-this-world yet old-school Highland adventure unfolds, testing each of the rescuers to have faith, just this once.

The world and they themselves could be so much more and the writer has embraced the challenge of presenting this, a new species and a final showdown ... in Ullapool.

I say final – but a sequel is on its way!

The Space Between Us by Doug Johnstone (Orenda Books, £9.99) is out now.

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