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space_and_sorcery 's review for:
The Drift
by C.J. Tudor
adventurous
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
No matter how much one tries, these days it’s almost impossible to avoid stories with a world-wide pandemic lurking in the background, and The Drift is no exception - granted, the deadly flu portrayed here is not at the core of the narrative, but rather an ancillary element, which made my journey through the book easier, also thanks to an intriguing plot that kept me turning the pages at a constant speed.
The Drift follows three groups of people facing life-threatening situations where survival requires extreme measures and also where one or more of the people in each group might not be what they look on the surface. Add to that the fact that infection is running rampant and that those who survive it turn into zombie-like Whistlers, and you have all the ingredients for a claustrophobic horror-mystery…
Hannah, the first of the three main characters in the novel, regains consciousness on a bus in the aftermath of the road accident that trapped the bus itself into a snowdrift: she and the other passengers are members of a private institute headed for the Retreat, a secure research site where they should be safe from the danger of infection. Roughly half of the passengers died in the crash, one of the survivors is mortally wounded and it appears as if the emergency exit of the bus has been sabotaged, so that the survivors have no means to get out - not that it would be advisable, since a vicious snowstorm is turning any kind of travel into a dangerous nightmare, and outside of the precarious safety of the bus wild beasts and Whistlers lurk in the surrounding woods.
Meg, a former detective plagued by depression after the death of her child, wakes up with a group of total strangers on a stalled cable car suspended over a mountain abyss and rocking frighteningly under the brunt of a snowstorm, which might be the same one hitting Hannah’s bus, since this group is also headed toward the Retreat, as volunteer testers for a cure against the virus. One of the passengers - none of which remembers getting on the cable car - is dead, not by natural causes, but as a victim of murder so that the forced closeness and the impending danger are further weighted by mutual suspicion and rampant accusations.
Lastly, in the Retreat itself, the team that conducts experiments on the virus (and I’m not talking of clean scientific methods here…) is preparing for the arrival of a huge snowstorm: it’s Carter’s turn to ski down to the almost-deserted village to procure some much-needed supplies and he’s far from sanguine about the journey, what with the beasts and Whistlers hiding in the forest and with the unsavory characters managing the village store. But that’s not the only problem, because the Retreat’s generator is acting up, tempers inside the hideout are acting up and there is a strange feeling permeating the group. Trouble knocks at Carter’s door when, on his return, he finds one of his colleagues murdered in the pool - and that’s only the beginning of the nightmare.
As you can see, the elements for a very tense drama are all present here, heightened by the author’s choice of moving cyclically through the three POV characters’ stories in a constantly escalating narrative that turns the novel into a compulsive page-turner. It’s clear, from the elements common to all three segments, that Hannah, Meg and Carter are somewhat linked or destined to meet, since the Retreat is the destination for two of the groups and the “home” of the third, and I was very pleasantly surprised at how the author managed to accomplish this while merging the three story-lines in a very unexpected way - this is indeed the big revelation on which The Drift is based.
The mechanism, however, is not quite perfectly oiled, so to speak. The characters are not as well defined as I would have liked, so that I kept feeling more of an observer than a participant invested in their fate. Granted, this is a story more plot- than character-oriented, and as such it works reasonably well, but still I prefer a novel where characters are presented in such a way that I feel something for them, and here this connection did not happen. Moreover, each group was composed by people with the exact same characteristics: a main figure through whose eyes we follow the action, and who tries to insure the group’s survival (Hannah, Meg, Carter); one character whose actions breed suspicion and whose intentions are not quite clear (Lucas, Sean, Miles); and a somewhat overbearing lady who seems to enjoy picking on the main character (Cassie, Sarah, Caren). This repetition saddled the story with a paint-by-the-numbers quality that took some of the enjoyment out of the read, and was further compounded by another form of recurrence where all three main characters felt that something of importance was almost within their grasp, but kept eluding them - once or twice might have been all right, but here the device was used far too often. The long, word-heavy explanations that in the end tied the three story-lines together did not help, as well, as they slowed the pace to a crawl and felt too convoluted to be truly effective.
Still, reading The Drift was no chore at all and I’m sorry I was unable to enjoy it more. The curiosity about this author’s other works was not diminished, however, and I will certainly satisfy it in the near future.