If Stranger Things had been set in Acton and 28 Days Later took place on a road trip down the M4 to Wales ...

With as much dark humour and heart as jump scares and gore, EMOTIONAL CREATURES is part apocalyptic horror, part science fiction and part family squabbles. ​

One day last winter,  everything changed. From out of the sky, like a plague of frogs, came the creatures.  Millions of them, the rotomorphs, like furry, black, prehistoric lice, with bulging cherry-red eyes. They descended on everything, and everyone, all at once. Taking any opportunity to latch onto a body, the alien parasites created legions of afflicted human hosts. It was, everyone agreed, a global shitshow. ​

Six months later, the creatures are still here. Society is limping on – with everyone hiding at home, it’s a lockdown version of business as usual. The creatures can’t be eradicated, they can’t be separated from their hosts and nobody knows why they’re here or what they want. The only thing that’s clear is that they respond to and feed off any sign of human emotion. ​

Former chef and frustrated stay-at-home-dad, Simon, is desperately trying to keep his family together. His agoraphobic, workaholic wife is permanently on Zoom; 17 year-old Theo is going stir crazy,  and 5 year-old Eva is developing a morbid fascination with the creatures. Meanwhile his afflicted dad, as distant as he ever was, is living in their shed with a grotesque neck-ruff of creatures for company, and his mother-in-law is a one-in-fifty-thousand outlier that’s completely immune to the alien parasites. 

His only friend is Mitch, the builder who is midway through their loft conversion, armed to the teeth and full of paranoia. ​

Between the militant Humans First groups that are starting to riot and the increasingly heavy-handed government interventions, the cracks are showing. The North Circular’s becoming more Wild West than West London, and when Simon starts to notice the creatures behaving weirdly whenever he is around, and then actively (and violently) intervening to save his life, he starts to realise that he might just be the key to discovering what they want with the people of Earth. ​

 ​As the threats close in on the family, they hit the road to get free of the shadowy military scientists and the terrorist thugs in order to find out if perhaps the creatures might not actually be the bad guys after all…​

Philip Webb is the author of two YA novels and this, his adult debut.  Begun as a way of keeping sane during lockdown and trying to creatively navigate the challenges of family life, Emotional Creatures skilfully blends the themes of alien invasions, repressed emotions and just trying to get everyone in the damn car.