The Three by Sarah Lotz

They're here ... The boy. The boy watch the boy watch the dead people oh Lordy there's so many ... They're coming for me now. We're all going soon. All of us. Pastor Len warn them that the boy he's not to­­--
The last words of Pamela May Donald (1961 - 2012)

 

In 2012 four plane crashes happen across the world on the same day and within a short space of time of each other. This day becomes known as Black Thursday.  Pamela Donald lives long enough to leave a mesaage on her phone but miraculously from three of the crashes there's a single survivor, and each one is a child. The children are creepy which I always find scary in a horror novel; they are Jessica Craddock, Bobby Small and Hiro Yanagida. We get to see how the crashes affect the bereaved and how they cope with looking after the children.

The story is told via excerpts, interviews, emails etc used for a book written by Elspeth Martins, an investigative journalist. I wasn't expecting this and to be honest was disappointed at first as I would have preferred if it had been told using more traditional story telling. It did work well though and the short sections because of this format made it easy to pick up and read in short bursts. The dictaphone messages recorded by Paul Craddock (Jessica's uncle) were probably my favourites but I found the online discussions between Chiyoko (Hiro's cousin) and her friend Ryu dull for the most part. 

 

I first heard of The Three last year and have been looking forward to reading it ever since. I was delighted to get a review copy from the publisher via Netgalley and started reading it straight away. I enjoyed it even though it wasn't quite what I was expecting, I thought it was going to be more of an out and out horror novel and I was a little disappointed with the ending, but don't let that put you off. It's a good novel but I was hoping it would be great, especially as it has been compared to Stephen King, a comparison which is always going to be hard to live up to and maybe this raised my expectations.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5