Thank you to NetGalley and Pan Macmillan for the ARC

Another thrilling read from Blake Crouch. This man can conjure up some amazing concepts and I eat it right up. It was suspenseful and action-filled. I was kept on the edge of my seat and never got bored. A fabulous thriller.

I really had trouble with this book, and ended up having to put it aside - not because it was bad, but because it was just too intense! I guess it's still too close to the pandemic times of 2020; I wasn't at all comfortable with the action because it struck a little too close to home with how much more possible it seems (something I'd never have said in The Before Times!).

I'll likely try again when I'm in the mood, as I always enjoy Blake's writing and gonzo ideas. Not right now, though, sorry!

I read an eARC of this book on NetGalley so thank you to the author and publisher.

This book is terrifying. I think this is the eighth Blake Crouch book I’ve read. There isn’t an author around that manages to maintain constant intensity with the integrity of plot as he does.

This is an apocalyptic tale following a family of four as they attempt to survive. An event happens and suddenly huge numbers of people lose any semblance of compassion and start murdering their friends, family, neighbours and complete strangers alike. We don’t know to begin with why, or why some people aren’t affected. The population is split into predator and prey.

The family we follow face various challenges in their bid to survive, lack of knowledge, the elements, losing the basic things needed for survival, the constant threat of being hunted. The fear and tension in this book never lets up. It is intensely fast-paced as the family races across the country, trying to find a place to take shelter in the hope of rescue or salvation.

I have read enough Blake Crouch books to know he is not afraid to make tough choices for his characters and I feared for them the whole time I was reading! Don’t read this book before bed, read it when you have a couple of hours to get through the whole thing in one sitting, it’s an absolute page turner and you won’t want to put it down. It’s also really quite horrific and there were some harrowing scenes as we see the depths of human cruelty and depravity.

Run by Blake Crouch is a unique and intense apocalypse thriller that hits the ground running and never lets up. The story begins with a wave of senseless and brutal murders sweeping across the country, escalating rapidly over the course of five days. The protagonist, Jack Colclough, hears his name read out over the Emergency Broadcast System as one of those targeted for death, forcing him and his family to flee for their lives.

The book has a similar feel to 28 Days Later, but with a chilling twist: there's no visible difference between those affected by this sudden outbreak of violence and those who aren't. This ambiguity adds an extra layer of fear, making it impossible to know who to trust. Crouch's narrative is fast-paced and relentless, propelling the reader through a landscape filled with danger at every turn.

However, potential readers should be aware that the book contains a lot of violence and strong language, which contributes to its raw and gritty tone. While the main characters endure injuries and threats, there's also a brief mention of rape involving a passing character, though it never directly affects the central family.

One issue I had was with the prologue, which felt disconnected from the main plot for a significant portion of the book. This narrative gap was a bit frustrating, as it took a while for the relevance of that opening scene to become clear.

Overall, Run is a gripping and fast-paced thriller that delivers a high level of tension and unpredictability. It's a great pick for fans of dark, apocalyptic stories who can handle the intense subject matter and unflinching brutality.

Recommendations:

Movie: 28 Days Later — a tense, high-stakes survival film that similarly explores the unpredictability of human nature in a crisis.
Book: The Road by Cormac McCarthy — for its bleak, apocalyptic atmosphere and focus on a father's struggle to protect his family against a hostile world.

Absolutely compelling, and very hard indeed to put down!
I really enjoyed this story, which was fairly easy to get in to, and swiftly became riveting.
As usual from this author, there is great writing, although in a slightly different manner to usual, and fantastic characters, all intriguingly flawed.
I did find it interesting that by the time I got to the epilogue, I had forgotten the prologue at the beginning, but the former suddenly made sense of the latter - a clever device, and I did like the way it linked in to part of the story.
Having read several of this clever author's books, I was slightly surprised at the book, which did seem a quite different style. At the end I realised that this is the first book that he published in 2011, but judging by the reviews on it at the time, it must have been extensively re-worked for the 2024 edition.

DNF at 45%

I'm absolutely gutted because I've really enjoyed all of Blake's other books that I've read so far and at the start I honestly thought I was going to love this one as well but even though there were some pretty tense scenes in this book it just didn't feel like it was going anywhere, I felt like I was stuck in a rut and didn't feel connected to the characters at all.

We start with a spate of very violent crimes. Brutal. Senseless. Unconnected. Or are they ? School shootings, mass murder, many dead. But why ? And things are escalating... Governments are baffled but plead for peace. To no avail. The violence escalates further and the killers, although initially isolated, start to gather. To prey further on the innocent. To facilitate this, they broadcast names and addresses... and this is where we start... when Jack hears his name and address. He is home with his wife and two children. They are coming for them. To kill them... the only option left to them, as the title of the book suggests, is to RUN!
And so begins a cat and mouse chase with Jack and his family trying to evade and outrun the killers, at the same time as sort of also trying to work out what in the heck is going on, and why?
Yes it does get a bit samey along the way as all that really happens is that they come across the baddies and take certain steps to evade or fight back. We do get to a crossroads later on where things get a bit more worrying, but it does take a wee while to get there. That said, it never dragged or got boring and the destination was definitely worth the meandering journey.
If I have one criticism it is that the focus was mainly towards the action rather than the characters and I would have liked it to be a bit more character driven at times.
It is worth noting that this is a re-release of one of the author's early books and I guess it shows that he has come a long way since writing it. But it is also important to note that without it, he also wouldn't be the author he is today...
My thanks go to the Publisher and Netgalley for the chance to read this book.

Jack and Dee need to pack up their kids and get out of town once the power goes our after an eventful 5 days. The family then go on a dangerous journey trying to find a safe haven, without knowing where that might be.

I appreciate that this is a republish, so it may have had more impact if I had read it back when it first came out, but sadly it felt a but same-y to other books of a similar vein. This was a great example of this type of book though!

Many thanks to Pan Macmillan and NetGalley for this free eARC.

A gripping, brutal, and emotional rollercoaster of a read!

‘Tears are fine, even healthy in this line of work, just never on the clock, never in the grave. If you lose control down there, you might never get it back.’ … This comes close to the start of the book, and it only gets better.

I loved the characters, who felt true to life and made me feel as though I were on the run and suffering the trials and tribulations with them. The settings, though fictionalised, were excellently crafted and sometimes almost became a character in their own right.

Two things bugged me majorly: 1. You’re out in the wilderness, fighting for your lives, and left home in a hurry … so fast that you had to leave lots of essentials behind, and yet … when removing a bullet, it gets dropped into an aluminium tray, which came from nowhere. That blooper pulled me right out of the scene. Why not simply drop the extracted bullet on the dirt of the rough terrain? Why would you even have such a tray with you? 2. A trained medic then gives said patient a handful of Tylenol, which Google tells me is an American brand of what we Brits call Paracetamol. Now, even four can kill through fatal liver damage. Usually it takes more, but not many more. So unless they were baby strength, a whole handful will kill you for sure unless someone gets enough charcoal into your system and quickly at that. Along with a bunch of other medical stuff. These two things ruined the tension and pacing of the scene for me. I suppose the nurse in me will never leave. Seriously, though, with such great research and writing, why make these basic mistakes? Anyhoo … mini rant over and moving swiftly along …

Aside from those two points, I loved this book. My fingers turned the ‘pages’ so fast my ereader surely must have smoked. If it did, the story had me too engrossed to notice. It brings terror, horror, brutality, love, the kindness of strangers, and a sense that you never ever know what’s coming next. One scene in particular brought tears to my eyes. Others had me gasping in shock, and yet more made me laugh.

Here are a couple of lines which stood out for me …

‘… that helplessness felt like loose electricity under her skin—wild and frantic but with no outlet.’

And …

‘How short the distance from life and thought to a sprawled shell in the grass.’ … this comes after a necessary yet reluctant fatal shooting and after the wonderful phrase: ‘XXX dropped like she’d been poured out of a glass,’. I’ve removed the name to avoid spoilers.

This excellent story offers a great ending with all the threads tied up. An emotive rollercoaster of a read, which kept me flipping those pages as though I’d been superglued to them. A full five solid stars from me. Go read this book!

***

NOTE ON RATINGS: I consider a 3-star rating a positive review. Picky about which books I give 5 stars to, I reserve this highest rating for the stories I find stunning and which moved me.


5 STARS: IT WAS AMAZING! I COULD NOT PUT IT DOWN! — Highly Recommended.

4 STARS: I WOULD PULL AN ALL-NIGHTER — Go read this book.

3 STARS: IT WAS GOOD! — An okay read. Didn’t love it. Didn’t hate it.

2 STARS: I MAY HAVE LIKED A FEW THINGS —Lacking in some areas: writing, characterisation, and/or problematic plot lines.

1 STAR: NOT MY CUP OF TEA —Lots of issues with this book.

This was such an intense read right away, the suspense definitely builds very rapidly, full of fear and danger throughout.

This is a well written and compelling thriller. And if that’s what you want, that’s exactly what you’ll get. But just that and no more.

An event has happened that has turned a majority of the population of the USA towards extreme, homicidal and cruel violence towards the remainder. Our heroes - Jack, Dee and their two children - are caught up in this. As part of the “remainder”, I should clarify. They spend the entire book engaged in the titular activity of running - in its figurative sense, at least, as it also involves walking, climbing, driving and, at one point, cycling.

And the running is relentless and, for the first third of the book at least, it seems directionless. Initially there isn’t even a MacGuffin for them to pointlessly strive for. They’re just running “away”, but where the collapse of civilisation seems to be all around them.

This is also a world in which you can count on two things: if you think that our heroes are safe, they’re not; and just when you think they’re all about to die, somehow they don’t. The car has just run out of fuel in the middle of nowhere! Oh, what’s that over there? Is that an abandoned house in the wilderness that we didn’t previously notice?

Our heroes, and various side characters along the way, also go through a wide variety of physical and emotional trauma. And a lot of people die horrible and graphically detailed deaths. This book doesn’t pull its punches.

But for all its formulaic gruesomeness, it was an absolute page turner. This book is from early in the author’s work, and doesn’t have the imaginative sophistication of Dark Matter or Recursion, but does have the pacy plot and absolutely compelling “what happens next?” that is also characteristic of his later work.

If you haven’t read any Blake Crouch before, then probably don’t start here - but it’s a solid and well written, if straight-forward, thriller.

Thank you #NetGalley and Pan Macmillan for the free review copy of #Run in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

At first, I wasn’t exactly a fan of Jack and Dee; they didn’t charm me right away. But as the pages flew by, I found myself cheering for them in a way I never expected! Run is a wild ride from Blake Crouch, and let me tell you, the story takes you on a thrilling adventure.

The premise is straightforward but packs a punch—survival in a world gone mad! Sure, the violence is intense, but it’s the character growth that really shines. I ended up rooting for Jack, Dee, Naomi, and Cole with all my heart! I was practically breaking for them; I would have hated to see them not make it. The family unit truly becomes a beacon of hope in this apocalyptic whirlwind.

Crouch balances nail-biting action with moments that tug at your heartstrings, creating a pace that’s like a roller coaster you can’t get off! The stakes are high and almost feel biblical as characters navigate a world turned upside down. It’s incredible to think this is a re-release of Crouch’s 2011 novel that launched his full-time writing career. If you’re looking for a fun, adrenaline-fueled read that will have you flipping pages late into the night, Run is definitely worth your time!

Thank you NetGalley and Pan Macmillan for a Review Copy

Pulse racing. Adrenaline fuelled. Heart pumping.

Perfect for those who enjoy:
- The worlds gone mad storylines
- A race against time
- Graphic and compulsive reading
- Pulse racing reads
- Apocalyptic books

With thanks to Panmacmillan and Netgalley for an ARC copy in return for an honest review.

This was a really good read..

It is pacy, gory ,, maybe a little too gory.. and it's descriptive..

This is book I think may not be for everyone, I was surprised that it was not at all what I expected,, but Oh my! it's an incredibly told tale.

Run was the first novel that Blake Crouch self-published after publishing several novels with a traditional publisher, and now it's been republished in the UK by Pan Macmillan. I was absolutely unsurprised by this novel's history, as it shares several characteristics of thrillers I've read recently that were either self-published or published by very small presses (Noelle W. Ihli's Run on Red comes to mind). And these characteristics are not necessarily bad, at all! In fact, they reveal tradpub's obsession with a certain kind of story structure that may work in some circumstances but not in others, and for my money, drags down a lot of thrillers.

Run is an incredibly simple novel, and indeed the blurb for this edition is a bit misleading. I was expecting something more like Black Mirror's brilliant 'Hated In The Nation', but it turns out there's no 'kill list' and no reason for anyone to be particular targets. Instead, it's a straightforward post-apocalyptic survival narrative. After everybody who witnessed an aurora visible in the sky across the United States and in northern Mexico turns feral, Jack flees from New Mexico with his wife and two children, seeking safety across the Canadian border. It's compulsive reading, and yes, the book does become a sequence of run-find water-find shelter-find food, but I had no problem with that at all - it kept me gripped.

Like Run on Red, Run is refreshing because it discards the unnecessary complexities that high-speed thrillers like this seem to think necessary nowadays. There's no real backstory, no secrets in the past, no character arcs. We invest in this family because we ourselves would want to survive in a similar situation. Essentially, we're reading a film, because Crouch doesn't take advantage of the interiority that novels offer. And to be honest, often this is just what I want from this kind of intense thriller. Half-baked motives and sketchy characterisation feel much worse to me than if the writer just discards the entire apparatus. It's cleanly written and immersive.

Having said that, I felt more uncomfortable with Run than I did with Run on Red and other thrillers of this kind, although it's fair to say it only exaggerates trends that are generally present in the kind of disaster movie or disaster novel where parents need to Protect Their Family At All Costs. (Frankly, at the much more literary end, I thought the film of The End We Start From suffered from some of these issues as well). The narrative choice to focus on a nuclear family is a savvy one from a marketing perspective but feeds into the idea that we should all put our own families and our own children first, that anything goes as long as you're doing it for the 'selfless' motives that come from being a parent. Run really dials this up to eleven. Jack actually thinks - at the midpoint of the novel, which appears to be a turning-point for his character, 'There was simply nothing in his experience that even compared with the thrill of killing to protect his family… He felt, possibly for the first time in his life, like a fucking man.’ Dee initially plays into gender stereotypes by refusing to kill for her children - 'You want to live in a world where we have to kill innocent people to survive? I won’t do that. Not even for you and Cole’ - but later in the novel, reverses this decision. It's really a great case study of how society believes selfishness can be somehow transmuted into selflessness, as long as you are a parent.

Run starts, interestingly, with a group of researchers digging up a mass grave, and along with its epigraph, from Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson’s Demonic Males, - 'Until the [chimpanzee] attack… scientists treated the remarkable violence of humanity as something uniquely ours’ - I thought that Crouch might be going to say something interesting about everybody's propensity for violence in certain social groups, of which the nuclear family is one. But no, the novel plops right back into Hollywood schmaltz by the end. Jack's son may have witnessed the aurora, but he didn't turn bad because he resisted the urge to kill – unlike all those naturally bad people, obviously, including Dee’s ex-lover. Not a single reflection on what Jack and Dee chose to do to survive, however understandable their choices may have been; indeed, Jack concludes, 'maybe sometimes we just need to kill each other. Maybe that’s our perfect state of being’. So, a rip-roaring novel, but also a great, frightening example of what we're willing to accept For The Sake Of Our Children.

[**** for being a good read. ** for being incredibly disturbing].

I love Blake Crouch’s scifi books, and was very pleased to get an ARC of this.
First off, it’s a re-release, originally released in 2011. I’ve no idea whether it has been re-drafted at all.
A post-apocalyptic story, where Jack,Dee and their children have to flee their home after half the population of the U.S turn into bloodthirsty killers.
It’s got a touch of ´The Day of the Triffids’, and ´The Last of Us’, with a lot of Mad Max’ thrown into the mix.
It’s a rollercoaster ride, with a lot of gore, which you kind of expect in the World-Gone-Mad genre. Mr. Crouch is extremely inventive when it comes to thinking up gruesome ways to kill people.
Personally, I would have liked a bit less gore and a bit more character-building, and you don’t really get much back-story. And there’s a wee bit too much ´just in the nick of time´stuff.
I’m not saying I didn’t like the book; it’s fast-paced and tense and I read it in a day. Just not in the same league as Dark Matter or Upgrade.

Thank you to Netgalley for allowing me to read this book in return for an honest review. I absolutely flew through this book in no time and I was on the edge of my seat the whole time! I’m a massive fan of this genre and found the book to be really well written and the story was so intriguing. The scenes were so descriptive that I felt as though I was there with the family on the run. A brilliantly written, fast paced story that I would highly recommend. 5 stars

Oh my goodness this is a heart in your mouth book all the way through! I literally had to read a true crime book at bedtime as that was more relaxing than Run.

Hats off to Blake who knows how to write amazing action thrillers. I know I can count on him to blow me off my feet.

My first book by this Author and let me tell you I will be going back to read his previous work. Not my usual kind of book but I thoroughly enjoyed it. I went in blind and I'm glad I did. You won't regret buying this, that's for sure.

An early novel by Blake Crouch but an enjoyable piece of speculative fiction. After a strange auroral event, a family are forced on the run. Fast paced, with elements of the supernatural, the story though horrific kept me hookd.