Frightful Friday is a weekly meme in which I feature a particularly scary or chilling book that I’ve read that week. Feel free to grab the button & join in! Be sure to include a link to your post in the Mr. Linky at the bottom of this post!
This week’s chilling book is RUN by Blake Crouch:
Picture this: A landscape of American genocide…
5 days ago: A rash of bizarre murders swept the country…Senseless. Brutal. Seemingly unconnected. A cop walked into a nursing home and unloaded his weapons on elderly and staff alike. A mass of school shootings. Prison riots of unprecedented brutality. Mind-boggling acts of violence in every state.
4 days ago: The murders increased ten-fold…
3 days ago: The President addressed the nation and begged for calm and peace…
2 days ago: The killers began to mobilize…
Yesterday: All the power went out…
Tonight: They’re reading the names of those to be killed on the Emergency Broadcast System. You are listening over the battery-powered radio on your kitchen table, and they’ve just read yours. Your name is Jack Colclough. You have a wife, a daughter, and a young son. You live in Albuquerque , New Mexico . People are coming to your house to kill you and your family. You don’t know why, but you don’t have time to think about that any more. You only have time to…. RUN!
When I received an email from Blake requesting that I review his new book, I couldn’t say no. Blake is one of the contributors to Draculas: A NOVEL, a book which I reviewed as part of Fright Fest last fall. Draculas was a horrifying read, and so was RUN, but in a completely different way.
RUN is a thriller: imagine the world as you knew it, transforming within a matter of days, into a reality in which no one was safe. Killing carvans, traveling from city to city, following the suggestions of a voice on the emergency broadcast system to systematically kill hundreds of innocent families.
No one knows the cause of this mass chaos; some think it is due to a phenomena of lights, an aurora of sorts, seen over the lower 48 states:
“You ever witness pure beauty…I saw perfection for fifty-four minutes, and it changed my life…”
Viewers of these lights transformed in a matter of hours, killing those who weren’t one of them. Viewers could easily identify one another by the light surrounding their heads.
Jack, his wife Dee & their two children Naomi & Cole must drop everything and run for their lives. Their relationship wasn’t a strong one; Dee admitted to having an affair & Naomi was a typical teen, disintersted in her family. But this race to safety, this race to save their lives, brings them back together.
They escape from Albuquerque and attempt to make it to Canada, the closest safe zone. On their journey they witness horrible scenes and have to survive incredible acts of courage and strength. The question is, will they make it alive?
I have to say up front that RUN, like Draculas, isn’t a book for everyone. It’s a very dark, violent, and at the start, quite a depressing read. I had flashbacks to THE ROAD by Cormac McCarthy. It’s a rollercoaster ride of a book, no lulls at all in the pacing. Ultimately, it is a story of strength, love, and perserverance. This family faces & overcomes all of the many test & obstacles thrown in front of them. Do they crash? Do they crumble? No..they survive, coming out stronger in the end.
I quite literally stayed up through the wee hours of the morning to finish reading this book. I was drawn to the family; I couldn’t sleep until I knew what happened to them. So if you have a strong stomach, I do highly recommend this read!
At this time, RUN is only available in ebook format. However, it is available for only $2.99 in an assortment of formats including:
$2.99 Kindle ebook •• $2.99 Sony ebook • $2.99 Nook ebook • $2.99 Smashwords ebook • $2.99 Diesel ebook • $2.99 Kobo ebook • PDF copy • $2.99 Google ebook
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