If there's a god watching over the universe in which James Murdoch wrote Gray Apocalypse, his debut novel of men in black and alien conspiracy, I suspect that god looks a lot like author Matthew Reilly (Ice Station, Area 7, Temple). I have to say it's only a suspicion as I've only ever managed to get through a couple of paragraphs of Reilly’s popular potboilers. Reilly is an amiable author with no illusions about the literary merit of his fiction and a confidence born of hard won success to care less about such trivial considerations as literary merit. But in the end it's a matter of taste and conspiracy theories, alien or otherwise, simply ain’t mine.

At least on the page (if they share screen time with Gillian Anderson, I’m all for them). Bernard Beckett in his excellent novel Genesis sums up the fundamental flaw with conspiracy theories: “History has shown us the futility of the conspiracy theory. Complexity gives rise to error, and in error we grow our prejudice.” For the most part, conspiracy theories emerge from paranoia and inadequate data.

So while SFFMedia always reads every novel we’re sent for review (we just don’t always finish them), you’d be right to think that Murdoch's Gray Apocalypse was up against the wall from the start. There I was, finger on the trigger, primed and ready to fire off a killing round when Murdoch did something completely unexpected: he told a bloody good story! It might be light years away from great literature (or even good literature for that matter) but I nearly missed my station on two occasions while reading Gray Apocalypse on the train (and not because I fell asleep). By any measure, that’s a good read.

Gray Apocalypse is a high-octane, plot driven novel of menace, utterly implausible and highly enjoyable. While I’m not a fan of the alien conspiracy on the page, I have watched the X-Files series from start to finish and seen enough movies to recognise that all of this sub-genre’s elements are present and accounted for in Murdoch's novel: the bad aliens (both varieties: the tall ones and the short ones); mysterious good aliens who are good for nothing except giving advice and refusing to intervene; human-alien hybrids; men in black (no Will Smiths here – these are the ones with no redeeming qualities); flying saucers (yep, the round ones); telepathy and other paranormal powers; a race against time to save the world from destruction; and, of course, a conspiracy at the very highest levels of government to cover it all up. There’s nothing original in any of this except for Murdoch’s re-arrangement of the pieces, and it is this which makes for compelling reading.

The publicity machine describes the novel as a heroic tale of redemptive action (well, it’s American, so redemption goes without saying) in which aliens have bred a race of hybrids to inherit the earth once the human race has been eliminated. Secret deals to share technology are a sham and the aliens bide their time while guiding an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. The novel’s hero is Michael Kendon, a former man in black, an assassin tasked with ensuring the conspiracy remains a secret. Naturally he has a change of heart and teams up with the (beautiful) daughter of a scientist who secretly prepared for the end he knew was coming (forewarned by the otherwise useless mysterious good aliens).

There’s no point dwelling on the plausibility of any of this, you'll just be wasting your time, as I did, wondering why the aliens would go to all the trouble of orchestrating the invasion of a planet for the benefit of a hybrid race that doesn't even exist until they breed it with the natives of the planet they seek to invade. Perhaps it was just for the hell of it. Then again, why use an asteroid to wipe out the human race, which surely would leave the planet in a shocking state for the foreseeable future, when surely a virus would be far more efficient?

Stop it! Really, there’s no point dwelling on this. Much like J.J. Abrams’ sensational re-vitalised Star Trek, you don’t want to think too hard about any of this – just enjoy the roller-coaster ride: it’s great fun.