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When I first read this book in 1980 I would have given it five stars. I was only months out of a Catholic boys' school, and much of the book felt like it was non-fiction.

In summary, cruelty and bullying are part of the system. The "adults" in charge of us were supposed to be above that, to protect us from the worst excesses of the cruelest of the children. In fact, the priests and brothers, most of whom were themselves ex-students, were just bigger versions of the children. They were older and more powerful members of the clique of bullies. Effectively, there were no adults, no protectors. The entire system was designed to destroy the spirit of any non-conformist. Authority was just another form of bullying.

Only "The Chocolate War" told it like it was. Its opening sentence is not well-known enough to be one of those trivia quiz answers, but it is up there with the best of them: "They murdered him." There is no saviour, no victory of righteousness like the humiliation of the evil Flashman in "Tom Brown's Schooldays". If you stand up against the system, you will be crushed.

The speaking of that truth was exhilarating to me. The more depressing the story, the better it was.

I still hold to that truth (reinforced by later revelations of child sexual abuse). But my later reading of Cormier's best-known novel was not so favourable. Mainly it's the sexism. There are no female characters. Drooling over distant girls as sex objects is presented as protagonist Jerry's fuel, so he can keep on going and be further tormented by the male bullies.

You get the impression that this is a book about boys, for boys, written by a boy. But if the boys involved are so casually indifferent to the horrors of rape, sexual harrassment and gender inequality, its creates structural weaknesses to the moral foundation of the rest of the story. So I knocked off a couple of stars.

Maybe when the perfect novel is written is will keep some of the doomed, maddening fury that is at the heart of "The Chocolate War".

The white-haired, golden-eyed, alien children of Midwich, with the murderous ability to compel humans to kill themselves and each other, are the stars of this story. They share the bill with the quintessentially English setting of the village where they are spawned.

Another Wyndham regular, the thoughtful visionary, appears here in the form of Gordon Zellaby, an eccentric retiree who is the only one thinking far enough ahead to stop of the strange events at Midwich from destroying humanity.

Unfortunately Zellaby, unlike the triffid survivalist Coker or the heretical chrysalids' uncle Axel, is a bit of a bore. His waffly pontifications slow the story down. Adding to this, a lot of the action happens through second-hand accounts, as the narrator doesn't witness the key events himself.

The children begin by exploiting their surrogate parents' natural instinct to nurture them, only to turn on their hosts with plans of world domination. This reflects a natural phobia people might have felt in the 20th century, as a succession of terrifying new ideas emerged from the febrile minds of young visionaries. After all, Hitler was somebody's baby once. It's the flip side of the usual trope, that children are the hope of the future.

The decade after this book appeared, it would be the youth feeling the terror of an older generation bringing nuclear brinkmanship, and forcing young people to fight cruel and meaningless wars on their behalf. Maybe that's why Wyndham's output pretty much stopped once the 60s came around. He just wasn't made for those times.

Wyndham's take on evolutionary competition is also brutal and absolutist: it's them or us, kill or be killed, red in tooth and claw. It's a bleak interpretation of inter-species relations, and not consistent with the totality of Darwinian science.

The story's pacing and the misunderstanding of evolutionary basics are not huge problems for me. The sheer originality and even beauty of this novel shine through more brightly. It is one of Wyndham's three masterpieces, although "The Day of the Triffids" and "The Chrysalids" are superior.

"Consider Her Ways", the longest and by far the best story in this collection, is unforgettable. Wyndham used time travel and its paradoxes repeatedly in his short fiction, and here it's a device to explore a future without men, an imagined society which comes across as a nightmarish dystopia to the the visitor from our time. His depiction of female characters is usually in a different league to his male contemporaries. Here he goes further and writes in the first person. I'm sure he would have consulted his partner Grace in his research, especially for this tale. She was his secret weapon.

Modern readers might recoil at the protagonist's horror to see an all-female future, and consider as redundant her defence of our sex and gender conventions. It would be an interesting exercise to write the same story from the point of view of the future historian who gives an alternative take on our romance-poisoned present.

I don't think I'm being too harsh in saying the other stories in this book are for completists only.