Whitley Strieber owns the edges. Those mysterious borderlands others choose not to acknowledge. His best-selling book Communion introduced readers to the enigmatic phenom of alien abductions, albeit with an element of the almost mystical that made his story stand out from the typical tales of implants and prods and probes. Now he continues to haunt the mind with The Grays, a truly hard-to-put-down thriller about alien abductions and a conspiracy of galactic proportions.

This fictional account of a group of Grays occupying small-town America will have you looking over your shoulder and leaving your nightlights on - not that doing so would stop the aliens. When they choose to abduct humans for their own hidden agenda, humans are utterly powerless. That’s what the government officials on both sides of the fence fear most. Some want to work with the Grays to keep both them and us alive. Others want to destroy the Grays, for their own dark agendas. Enter into this tale of light and dark a young boy named Conner Callaghan with very special genes, and his parents, both of whom have their own deep connections to the Grays.

There are the usual officials behind any alien conspiracy, but Strieber’s story takes a unique turn with Lauren Glass, a government-trained “empath” just as her father was, who alone can communicate with the captured Gray being held at a top-secret facility. She will become a critical part of the climactic ending, where the good guys meet the bad guys above and below, and Conner’s life is at stake, along with the survival of both the Grays and humans.

Intricate, fun, exciting, thrilling and chilling, The Grays is a blockbuster that will have pages flapping at top speed as readers forge through to the ending, hoping to have all their questions answered. Do they get them answered? I won’t tell. But I will say that the journey is certainly worth it. Whether you “believe” or not in aliens and Grays, it doesn’t matter. This is a story that will leave you breathless, and maybe even change your mind (in either direction).