Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
I checked this out from the library yesterday and finished it before bedtime. Not bad for a book from 1951.
The book starts out with our protagonist waking up in his hospital bed, eyes bandaged from an incident, not knowing if his sight will return, but knowing that something is terribly wrong. One of my few complaints about the book is we don’t spend very long with the character being blind, it would have been a neat trick. That said, everything is tense enough.
You see, everyone that watched these green flashes in the sky (which was most of the world) went blind. On top of this there’s predatory (as in walks around and stings you to death from ambush) plants, called triffids. Relatively harmless when managed, and providing high quality animal fodder, but the blind population is terribly exposed to the danger they present.
There’s other bits, but I won’t spoil them for you. The best part, for me, is that there is no external agency to this story. Aliens and wizards played no part, it was all the fault of our own hyper aggressive cultures.
I’m not sure how to feel about the despair and lack of functionality people in this story take on when blinded.
Oh, and I found the whole thing drew some strong parallels to 28 Days Later. I never saw the movie made from Day of the Triffids, and it’s certainly not unique enough to say for sure, but it wouldn’t shock me to find out that either movie or book lent a strong hand to the formation of Boyle’s movie.