The Three by Sarah Lotz
This much hyped novel more than lives up to the hype. It is an excellent creepy read. On Black Thursday, 4 planes crashed on 4 different continents. 3 children survive and 1 woman who lives only long enough to record a message, a warning. It will change the world. Hysteria over the mysterious crashes, the incipient madness of those left behind, the dubious tirades of preachers, the media dismantling lives and the increasingly vile and demanding behaviour of the child survivors turns benevolence to impassioned fear to harsh violent action.
Is the preacher spiritually bankrupt or ideologically correct when the damns the 3 children as omens of the End Times? This is a suitably creepy and atmospheric tale told in fragmentary sections from various insecure bourgeois. It’s all on display here: a self pitying pig cracks, religious pastoralists sense something rotten in their midst, morally murky, rancid and bestial politicians use animus for their own ends and various arrogant, thick, incompetents are manipulated. It all comes to a suitably overwhelming ending.
Best Lines:
“Sobbing with the gusto of an Eastenders character.”
“One of those botoxed American horrors with Tom Cruise teeth and too much make-up.”
“He’s caught them in all their thuggish glory, Ma Addams glaring into shot, the brothers and various offspring standing around her like an advert promoting the benefits of birth control.”
“Saying those children were murderers. How they’d killed all those people on the planes, and he couldn’t understand why no one could see that.”
“You could see it was going to go bad, you could smell it.”
“Guess they didn’t reckon on a backwater preacher being able to reach out into the wider world and cause the trouble that he did.”