The Drift by C. J. Tudor

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?

---

I know that there are some real fans of C. J. Tudor’s work, so bear with me while I say this.  I’ve not read much by Tudor (so far), but I enjoyed The Taking of Annie Thorne and her short story collection, A Sliver of Darkness.  But when The Drift was first published in 2023, the blurb didn’t appeal.  At all.  Three separate groups, all stranded in their own unique way, and each with a killer in their midst.  Really?  I expect I rolled my eyes upon reading it.  But I saw a nice, clean copy (yes – condition is important to me, even when buying second hand) in a local charity shop recently, and thought “why not?!”

Feeling a little under the weather at the weekend, I wanted something to lose myself in, and picked The Drift off the shelf on a whim.  A few hours later, I was some 200+ pages in and fully engrossed.  What a fantastic book this is, and what a brilliant writer C. J. Tudor is.  The blurb is deliberately vague, and while it didn’t appeal to me initially, I do now have a better appreciation of it although I still think it lets the book down somewhat.  This is a novel that is best approached with as little prior knowledge as possible, and as such I won’t go into the plot in any real detail, other than to reiterate what an excellent novel this is!

The narrative alternates between three characters.  There’s Hannah, a student who wakes up following a coach crash, a little bruised but largely uninjured, who begins to help her fellow passengers who’ve suffered varying degrees of injury.  Questions quickly arise – what happened, but also how they’re going to leave the coach given that the doors are blocked, and the hammers intended for breaking the windows in an emergency are missing.  There’s Meg, a former police officer stranded in a cable car some 1,000 or so feet above the ski slopes (quite possibly my worst nightmare – I’ve no head for heights!).  To keep her company are five others, one of whom quickly proves to be dead (not a spoiler – it’s in the second chapter).  Then there’s Carter, one of a small group at a ski chalet / research cabin in the woods (although exactly what that research entails isn’t immediately clear) as a storm moves in.  These three narratives unspool slowly, gradually revealing their secrets, and I was hooked from the beginning – I couldn’t wait to see how each scenario would play out.    

The Drift is such a clever novel.  The reader is thrown in at the deep end with no preamble or explanation as to who these characters are or how their circumstances have come about.  That background is revealed gradually over the course of the novel, giving the reader the wider context and a greater understanding of the world in which The Drift is set.  I did work out a few minor details early on, but Tudor still had plenty of surprises in store for me.  This is horror, and so expect some blood and gore, but it’s brilliantly done, and I love the way that Tudor made me feel the claustrophobia of being trapped in with these characters, with seemingly little hope of rescue. 

Despite my initial reservations, The Drift turned out to be a fantastic novel, and one that I was happy to lose myself in – it’s relentless, in the best possible way, and I loved seeing the three separate narratives play out and eventually come together.  And Tudor is a superb writer.  The Drift offers the reader a horror novel with a little something extra, giving it a unique flavour – it’s not quite like anything I’ve read previously.  While I know horror isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, I highly recommend this if you’re at all tempted.