Fiction Reviews
Run
(2011/2024) Blake Crouch, Macmillan, £20, hrdbk, 322pp, ISBN 978-1-035-04465-8
Blake Crouch will be known to many, I’m sure, as the author of the Wayward Pines trilogy, which was adapted for TV with a pilot directed by M. Night Shyamalan and also, more recently, for Dark Matter, the basis for a series that debuted on Apple TV last year. Run (2011) was initially self-published and it retains that feel of an early work that doesn’t quite cohere as a story. It opens with a young woman joining a forensic team at the site of a mass grave, which is suggestive of the horrors that are to come but also indicative that there will be some glimmer of light at the end of this dark, dystopian tale.
We are then invited to observe a post-coital scene in a hotel room, as a woman is suddenly and brutally faced with the realisation that her erstwhile lover has acquired a dark and violent side to his personality. So far, so very noir, but it turns out the woman is Dee, the wife of university philosophy professor Jack Colclough, who, one morning, hears his name and address read out on the radio as one in a list of ‘targets’. Panicking, fearful, Jack and Dee bundle their two kids into the SUV and set off out of the city, driving hard, evading roadblocks, running for their lives. Hence the title.
After a few chapters, however, the air of prescience evaporates as it turns out that the cause of the murderous rage that has gripped half the population has less to do with politics and more with an earlier dramatic physical event. I won’t introduce a spoiler here but suffice to say that although the idea is partly based on a serious if disputed hypothesis about the demise of the Neanderthals, the physics of it makes little sense and, crucially, that ominous and dramatically effective sequence of names being read out on the radio is never actually explained.
Nevertheless, the Colclough Family’s desperate attempt to flee northwards across the US and seek refuge in Canada is tautly conveyed (even though it’s not clear why Canadians wouldn’t be affected too). Furthermore, as well as writing in a gripping style, the author obviously has an excellent grasp of the geography of the countryside they pass through and the significant challenges that would present. And just as I was beginning to wonder if this was going to be one of those macho “Yes I do believe I could fight a bear” stories as Jack the philosopher morphs into Jack the survivalist, the family are forced to split up and the focus then shifts onto Dee who also proves more than capable of keeping their two children safe. If anything, her part of the story is rendered all the more powerful by her lack of ‘outdoorswoman’ skills, which she has to make up for in other ways.
Of course, the family are eventually reunited for an emotional but also heart-wrenching, if not entirely unexpected, finale. As is typically the case in such tales, sacrifices have to be made. However, in returning to the forensic examination of the mass grave that features at the beginning, the epilogue does provide a degree of closure, with the suggestion of a new, and hopeful, normal now established.
As you might expect, the labels ‘action-packed’ and ‘page-turner’ are definitely applicable here, although it does tend toward the relentless by the end, in the manner of The Walking Dead, with some similarly stomach-turning passages. And, as I said, the explanation for all the madness and mayhem that the Colclough family are subjected to is tenuous at best. Still, even though it’s not perhaps one of his finest books, if you’re a fan of Crouch’s work and you didn’t pick this up when it first appeared, it’s worth adding to your collection.
Steven French
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