The Drift by CJ Tudor is horror at its best. An apocalypse involving a deadly virus, a world where society has almost completely fallen apart resulting in an everyone for themselves mindset, and people infected by the virus who seem similar to zombies, except these infected have some level of intelligence/sentience. They’re able to use weapons and other things the typical zombie cannot. I loved that spin.
It took me probably about a quarter of the book to get into it, but once I did, I was IN. I’m not entirely sure why, but I had to pick this one up and put it back down a few times before I got going. I don’t know if it was simply that it felt like a slow start for me, or if the switching viewpoints made it slower to get invested, but regardless, I’m glad I kept up with it because I really ended up enjoying it in the end.
There are three different viewpoints followed throughout. There is Carter, living in a facility with a few others where they produce a vaccine for the virus. There’s Meg who is stuck on a lift up high with nowhere to go in the dead of winter with strangers she can’t trust. And there’s Hannah, trapped on a crashed bus and trying to figure out a way out of it when it’s buried beneath snow.
I’ll be honest, there were a few moments I regretted very deeply that I was reading while eating because there was some very explicitly gory moments. But it just made the horror more real which I loved. This book was kind of a wild ride near the end and I couldn’t stop reading it until I finished by that point. I really enjoyed how all of the different storylines came together by the end and dropped little bits and pieces throughout to show how they would relate by the end. I will say I was a bit thrown by the ending (false ending?) and then relieved that there were a few more chapters that cleared a few things up, though not everything. I thought it was a sequel sampler at first.
Although I had a difficult start with this book, once I really got going with it, The Drift ended up being everything I had hoped but also more and I really enjoyed it. Perfect for horror fans, it also contains a bit of mystery like a thriller, and is great for lovers of apocalypse stories.
