Hive Mind: At the very least, all of the male children and all of the female children are linked together.

If the book can be said to have a protagonist, it would have to be Zellaby.

First-Person Peripheral Narrator: The narrator, Richard Gayford, is a fairly uninspiring and relatively uninvolved observer.

A lot, though, is because they understand the concept of the preemptive strike extremely well. Some of this is by simply not quite understanding their own strength or how humans work (the boy Child doesn't seem to understand that he's permanently damaged the Chief Inspector, for example).

Disproportionate Retribution: Any pain inflicted on the children is immediately met by the harshest retaliation they can muster, no matter whether it was an accident.

They are also capable of not being this, provided they like you enough-Gayford is stunned by how they act around Zellaby.

Creepy Child: Although, unlike the examples in both film adaptations, they don't stay that way, at least not physically.

Rather horribly, at least one of the virgins is a 'woman' in that she's started menstruating but is really little more than a child herself.

But I Can't Be Pregnant!: Virgins and a faithful wife whose husband has been away for several months are understandably perplexed.

Bizarre Baby Boom: When every woman of child-bearing age wakes up from a day they don't remember pregnant.

Bittersweet Ending: Gordon Zellaby, the Children's school teacher and the only person they respect, decides that the Children are too dangerous to let live and uses a bomb to kill them all alongside himself inside the school.

They also don't hate humanity they merely see conflict between the two species as inevitable and therefore intend to win.

Blue-and-Orange Morality: The Children aren't being deliberately malicious as we would understand it-they simply put protecting themselves above literally everything else.

It's a human baby she just happened to conceive at the worst possible time.

Asshole Victim: The wifebeater father of one of the babies is forced to repeatedly punch himself in the face after striking his infant son hard enough to leave a bruise.

Sky has a series based on the novel premiering in 2022. It has been filmed twice under the title Village of the Damned, first in 1960 and then in 1995. The Midwich Cuckoos is a 1957 science fiction novel by John Wyndham.Īll the women of childbearing age and capability in the Idyllic English Village of Midwich simultaneously become pregnant with alien children who all share the same uncanny appearance and have the ability to mentally manipulate people.

The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham