THE DRIFT by C. J. Tudor

THE DRIFT

CJ Tudor

Michael Joseph (penguin.co.uk)

£14.99

A bus, crashed in the wilderness, leaving a handful of survivors to fight their way out of their snowy tomb. A cable car, broken down within sight of its destination, the passengers suspended hundreds of metres above the snowy landscape with a murderer in their midst. And a secret research station, perched atop a snowy mountain, manned by a dysfunctional crew, with something dangerous locked in the basement behind high-tech electronic locks and a generator on the fritz. This is CJ Tudor’s post-apocalyptic, virus-ridden world, and these are the seemingly unrelated stories of Hannah (bus), Meg (cable car) and Carter (research station).

CJ Tudor has been an author worth watching ever since her blockbuster debut, The Chalk Man, back in 2018. While we’re on that subject, if you haven’t read the aforementioned debut, you really should give it a shot, especially if you’re a Stephen King fan. But I digress! Her novels have always straddled the often-blurred line between crime and horror – psychological thrillers with a touch of the supernatural or a hint of something dark and terrible. With The Drift, Tudor very much steps out of her comfort zone and takes us to a near-future dystopia where a virus has killed much of the planet’s population, and left many more in such a state that we have to wonder – along with the survivors – if death might not have been preferable.

Here’s a simple truth: the COVID-19 pandemic has changed post-apocalyptic fiction forever. When Captain Trips didn’t wipe out 99% of the world’s population before the end of March 2020, we realised that the reality was – as usual – much more mundane than fiction had prepared us for through everything from The Andromeda Strain to The Walking Dead and all points between. Tudor’s latest novel is one of the first to examine this new reality: what if it doesn’t wipe us out, but puts a strain on resources, makes us all suspicions of everyone else and changes things just enough to cause us untold grief? Couple this with an ecological disaster that leaves the world looking like Hoth and you’ve got yourself a party!

Tudor has always put character first in her novels and The Drift is no different. Alternating between the three key voices and locations, the novel tells three stories seemingly only connected by the world they inhabit. Hannah, a schoolgirl, wakes to find that the bus that was supposed to be taking her and others from her school to the mysterious Retreat has crashed. The few survivors must find a way off the bus and out of the snow before they freeze to death or became food for the local wolves. Meg, an ex-cop wakes from her own drugged slumber to find that the cable car she was put on – also heading for the Retreat – has stopped and that one of her fellow passengers has been murdered. Again, survival is their first thought, and freezing temperatures their primary concern. Carter is part of a group in a remote facility that may well be the Retreat. Their generator is failing and there’s something in the basement that makes a lack of electricity a very serious problem indeed. Add in the fact that none of these people trust any of their colleagues, and the tension just keeps ratcheting upwards.

The common thread shared by the three stories is distrust. Each of the central characters finds themselves in a position where they must trust the people around them in order to survive, while also questioning everything about everyone else, because to let down their guard is only inviting disaster. Tudor perfectly captures that helpless – almost paranoid – feeling that a rampaging virus elicits in us all, the nagging reminder of an ancient survival instinct, and ramps it up to the next level. If the COVID-19 pandemic has changed how writers approach writing post-apocalyptic fiction, it has also changed how we, as readers, consume it. We are a little bit more jaded than we were before, perhaps a little bit more arrogant. As a result, the author needs to work that much harder to draw us in, and to tap into our fears. Tudor does this, in part, by introducing the Whistlers, a so-called fate-worse-than-death, knocking us down a peg or two and giving some heartburn-inducing food for thought.

In short, The Drift is a beautifully-crafted puzzle that will amuse and delight anyone who dares to step into its frozen world. Every character – even those whose points of view we are presented – gives us reasons to distrust or outright dislike them, and Tudor leaves us in the dark as to what’s going on in the wider world for as long as possible. The cold feels almost like a character in its own right, and the reader will feel chilled to the bone as their journey progresses. It feels like a gamble, but it’s one that has, for this reader, paid off in spades: the move away from the genre for which she is best known may not sit well with many readers, but it’s obvious from the outset that horror is a genre that CJ Tudor loves and one in which she is very comfortable writing. This is a book that pays back in spades and while it’s still only January, is one I expect to see on many “best-of” lists come the end of the year. The perfect read for these cold winter nights, but best bring a pair of gloves.