The Drift by C.J. Tudor

Published by Ballantine Books on January 31, 2023

Following too many years of zombie novels, pandemic novels seem to be the new thing. After experiencing the reality of a pandemic, I suppose readers want to be comforted by reading about how it could be so much worse. Pandemics that kill almost everyone would meet that desire, but what about a pandemic that produces zombies? The Drift has a little something for every fan of trash fiction.

A world-ending virus is killing most people it affects, although a small percentage survive as Whistlers. Whistlers aren’t exactly zombies, but they are not entirely unlike zombies. The ones infected with the Choler variant are mindlessly violent like zombies, but they don’t shamble or eat brains. At least, they don’t appear to do so. The Whistlers are never developed in enough detail to make their nature clear, although it’s clear that living as a Whistler would not be a lifestyle of choice.

Blood plasma from infected people can be used to manufacture a vaccine that confers short-term immunity, so naturally infected people are kept alive and imprisoned so their blood plasma can be harvested for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful. One place where harvesting occurs is called the Retreat. It’s on a mountaintop. If there were ever good intentions underlying the Retreat, they have given way to producing the vaccine for a criminal organization that supplies it to wealthy people. The criminals presumably immunize themselves so they don’t get sick and die like everyone else, but the benefit they receive from wealthy people in a world that is filling up with dead people and Whistlers is one of many gaps in logic that the novel doesn’t seriously address.

Part of the novel follows characters at the Retreat who are dealing with the theft of plasma and the disappearance of workers. Whistlers are kept locked in the basement as involuntary plasma donors. But if the power goes out for longer than eight seconds, the cells automatically unlock. It took a special kind of sub-genius to devise that system. It will be no surprise to learn that the power fails.

Two other plot threads involve the dumbest young people you would ever hope not to meet. A dozen students at Invicta Academy are being evacuated on a bus that slides off the road and crashes during a blizzard. One of the bus passengers is pregnant and about to deliver because of course she is.

The Academy was just a private school for rich kids until the Department chose it as the location for a research center headed by a leading virologist. (The Department’s full name results in the acronym DRIFT because the world thrives on stupid acronyms.) Did the Department choose to turn a private school into a research center because no research centers were already set up and ready to go? Really? What happened to the CDC in Atlanta?

In any event, one of the kids on the bus is the daughter of the ruthless virologist who runs the Department. “Ruthless” because he wants to kill everyone who becomes infected, meaning pretty much everyone, including his daughter (or so she fears).

Anyway, after the bus crashes the emergency exit won’t open, probably because it was sabotaged by the bus driver who somehow disappeared unless he’s now pretending to be one of the bus passengers. Seriously, none of the passengers looked at the driver before the bus crashed? I guess private school students can’t be bothered to look at the bus driver.

A student hits upon the brilliant idea of pulling the toilet out of the bus and escaping through the hole they imagine they might find. Now, if you can remove the toilet, why not use it to break a window on side of the bus that isn’t buried in snow and get out that way? They complain that they don't have a hammer to break the window but the thought of using a steel toilet as a battering ram never occurs to them.

But wait, a passenger has already tunneled through the snow from a broken window in the side of the bus that is buried. The tunnel was necessary to search for a bomb in the luggage compartment (the passengers miraculously deduce that the bomb exists and know when it will explode based solely on intuition) but they decide they can’t rebuild the tunnel after it collapses because, well, that would be almost as easy as breaking another window. Besides, there are wolves outside and maybe Whistlers and it’s just so darn cold so maybe it would be better to stay inside the bus. Until the Department hit squad shows up to spoil that idea with machine guns. Good grief.

Another group of young people are stranded on a cable car that, while climbing the mountain to the Retreat, stops after the haul cable breaks. The young people don’t remember getting on the cable car. Escaping from a cable car without plummeting to the ground is more challenging than disembarking from a bus, so the cable car passengers busy themselves with killing each other. That task becomes easier when one of them finds a hidden weapon. There’s a whole story to how the weapon came be hidden but it makes just as much sense as the rest of the novel, meaning it doesn’t make much sense at all.

Some of the people in each group might be infected so they might as well sit back and die in peace. Instead, the passengers in both conveyances spend an inordinate amount of time discussing their predicaments and blaming each other while devising worthless plans. Frankly, I was rooting for hit teams to do away with all these whiny idiots. They make the same snarky comments (“Excuse me, I forgot to pack my screwdriver”) over and over while doing little in the way of cooperative problem-solving.

The needlessly convoluted plot eventually connects the kids on the bus to the kids on the cable car, relying on false identities and a late information dump to produces surprises that are too silly to shock. A mawkish moment near the story’s end produced no tears but it did make my eyes roll. The best thing I can say about The Drift is that many characters die before the novel ends. Good riddance to them.

NOT RECOMMENDED

The Chalk Man by C.J. Tudor

Published by Crown on January 9, 2018

The Chalk Man mixes elements of horror with a conventional thriller, including the ghost of a kid who just drowned showing up to give a message to the protagonist, who at that point is also a kid. The reader (and the protagonist) might think that’s a dream except that the ghost dissolves into a stick man drawn from chalk on the protagonist’s driveway that’s still there in the morning.

Half of The Chalk Man takes place in 2016. Ed is a teacher. His childhood friend Mickey is back in town, much to the displeasure of his childhood friend Gav who is in a wheelchair because of an accident that occurred while Mickey was driving. Mickey wants to write a book with a possible TV tie-in about a murder and dismemberment that happened 30 years earlier. Ed was at the center of that incident, having found parts of the body. Mickey claims to know the murderer’s identity and wants Ed’s help to renew relationships so that he can develop the story.

Alternating with scenes from 2016 are scenes from Ed’s past, beginning with the day he helped Mr. Halloran save a girl’s life after an amusement park accident. Ed was a kid and Halloran, an albino, was about to start teaching at his school. Halloran, who likes to make drawings in chalk, takes a strong interest in the girl whose life he saved.

Other events in the past revolve around Ed’s group of friends, including Metal Mickey, whose relationship with Ed is altered by the fate of Mickey’s bullying brother. Ed is attracted to a young girl, but her father is a preacher who encourages ugly protests against the town’s abortion clinic, where Ed’s mother happens to work. There are several other surprises associated with the scandalous events of 1986 that C.J. Tudor slowly reveals, culminating with the murder that Mickey wants to write about 30 years later. Stick men drawn from chalk are linked to the murder and to another crime, and of course, the reader wonders whether the obvious suspect is actually guilty.

Back in the present, new murders are occurring, and messages containing stick men are being sent to Ed and his surviving childhood friends. The novel builds tension by asking the reader to guess who will be the next victim. The novel’s mystery naturally centers on the killer’s identity and motivation.

Several characters, including Chloe, the mysterious girl who rents a room from Ed in the present, and Nicky, daughter of the preacher who hates Ed’s parents, help expose the hypocrisy of people who insist on telling others how to live while failing to follow their own advice. The key characters have enough personality to make them seem as real, and even minor characters come across as authentic.

I’m not sure the ending is quite as surprising as Tudor intended it to be. More troubling is that it requires a serious stretch of the reader’s imagination to accept that all the events in both time frames happen as the novel describes. Critical moments at the end of the novel, while adding some exhilaration to the story, seem impossibly contrived. Still, getting to that point is enjoyable, and I can’t say that I felt disappointed by the ending, given that the story as a whole is also a bit contrived, albeit entertaining. At the same time, some details at the end that I feared would be left dangling are wrapped up neatly. In fact, the final details are so creatively creepy that they redeem the novel’s faults.

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