The Three

 

By Sarah Lotz

Horror | Thriller

My Review

Well, this was a bit of a strange one! Having read and loved the author's later (2017) novel, The White Road, I took the plunge and decided to give The Three a go. It took a while to get to grips with the structure and writing style — a book within a book; a series of eyewitness accounts and interviews — but, upon reflection, it worked well. The fact it wasn't quite what I expected didn't detract from a wonderfully creepy tale.

Four plane crashes on the same day stun the world. Miraculously there are three child survivors, dubbed 'The Three'. Unable to pinpoint a cause for the simultaneous accidents, investigators are baffled.  Upon returning to their respective homes, the children exhibit strange, unsettling behaviour. Those closest to them begin to question whether something supernatural is occurring. Religious fanatics are convinced The Three are harbingers of the apocalypse.

The story was extremely disturbing; with the reader having to draw their own conclusions on several aspects. On the whole it was a good read but I felt the pacing suffered due to the length of the book.

Book Source: Purchased copy

My Rating ⭐⭐⭐

Paperback: 480 pages

Publisher: Hodder (26th Feb 2015) 

ISBN-13: 978-1444770384

The Blurb

Four simultaneous plane crashes. Three child survivors. A religious fanatic who insists the three are harbingers of the apocalypse. What if he's right?

The world is stunned when four commuter planes crash within hours of each other on different continents. Facing global panic, officials are under pressure to find the causes. With terrorist attacks and environmental factors ruled out, there doesn't appear to be a correlation between the crashes, except that in three of the four air disasters a child survivor is found in the wreckage.

Dubbed 'The Three' by the international press, the children all exhibit disturbing behavioural problems, presumably caused by the horror they lived through and the unrelenting press attention. This attention becomes more than just intrusive when a rapture cult led by a charismatic evangelical minister insists that the survivors are three of the four harbingers of the apocalypse. The Three are forced to go into hiding, but as the children's behaviour becomes increasingly disturbing, even their guardians begin to question their miraculous survival...