[In "The Day of the Triffids"] John Wyndham has created … tripodal and lethal mobile plants which he calls "triffids"—something to haunt your nastier nightmares for some time to come. What's more he has presented these abominable creatures in a novel of quite unusual literacy and even, in its strange way, charm. The concept of a civilization in chaos reverting to primitivism is anything but new; but it has rarely been treated with such plausibility of detail, such immediacy of human impact.

H. H. Holmes, "Science Fiction," in New York Herald Tribune Book Review (© I.H.T. Corporation), August 19, 1951, p. 12.∗