Survival is murder . . .
An overturned coach full of students. All of them are trapped.
An isolated chalet full of friends. Soon they’ll be enemies.
A stranded cable car full of strangers. One of them is dead.
Outside, a snowstorm rages.
Inside each group, a killer lurks.
But that’s not their only problem.
Why is no rescue coming?
What are they trying to escape from?
And who are the terrifying Whistlers?

IN A NUTSHELL
‘The Drift‘ was a clever, complex, dark and deeply depressing speculative fiction book that followed three groups of people who were trying to survive the end of their world.

It was well-written, believable, cleverly structured story that was vividly told but was deeply unpleasant and depressingly bleak. The overall message seemed to be that the world has two types of people: good guys and survivors.

I thought the three storylines ran in parallel for a little too long, letting the narrative drag, but the way they came together was clever enough and powerful enough to make up for that.

 The opening chapters of ‘The Drift‘ hooked me effortlessly. They dropped me into the midst of three groups of people, all linked somehow to a place called The Retreat. All were trapped in a fierce snowstorm: one group in a crashed bus, one group in a stranded cable car and one group in an abandoned ski chalet. All three groups had people dead or missing or both. All were faced with an immediate threat to their survival, including from a killer inside each group. Each group’s story was told from the point of view of one person in the group, so I only found out what they found out and I only knew what they revealed about themselves and others, which couldn’t always be trusted as each of the people telling their story had something to hide.

The intimacy and intensity of this was increased in the audiobook by having one narrator for each group, making it compelling to listen to.

The chapters rotated through the three groups, slowly adding details of the apparently global disaster that they were all trying to live through. My curiosity was deeply engaged both by what was happening in each group and by wondering how the groups were connected.

I could see that the three stories were starting to converge. They had characters from their backstories in common and a destination in common. The rationale behind the convergence and the reason each group found itself in such a perilous situation remained tantalizingly obscure.

Bad things happened to and were done by the members of each group. Each of the three situations was so intense that I couldn’t listen to the book for more than a couple of cycles through each situation before I wanted to take a break.

After cycling between the groups many times, I began to get a little tired of following three storylines, especially when the one in the cable car felt like a pale shadow of the one in the bus, but I never lost my curiosity about how it would all come together. I’m glad I kept reading. I would never have predicted how the storylines connected. The answer, when it came, was clever enough and powerful enough to have made the wait worthwhile.

I liked that the story didn’t really have any good guys, just some guys who do bad things out of perceived necessity rather than ingrained habit. It was a refreshing change from stories in which the good guys struggle to do the right thing and win against the odds.

Still, this made ‘The Drift‘ a rather grim read. The overall message of the book seemed to be that the world has two types of people: good guys and survivors. Of course, not all survivors are the same. Some are broken by their survival. Some survive because they are broken. Some reach a point where the price of survival is too high and a different choice is needed.

One of the lines in the book was: “Everyone loves an anti-hero.” Well, make that everyone but me. I disliked almost all of the characters, even the ones from whose point of view the story was being told. It’s a tribute to C. J. Tudor’s storytelling that, even though I didn’t like these people, I believed in them and I wanted to know what they were prepared to do to survive.