Review - Survivors by G X Todd #HearTheVoices

Survivors (Voices, 3)
GX Todd
Headline, 31 October 2019
PB, e, 500pp

I'm grateful to Headline for a free advance reading copy of Survivors. Make that VERY grateful. This was one of my most anticipated reads of 2019 - and it didn't disappoint.

Survivors is a post-apocalyptic tale, the third (but not final!) in its sequence after Defender and Hunted. In this dark world, many people developed voices in their head - voices that urged them to kill others, and sometimes to destroy themselves. Enough of this, and civilisation soon dies. It's not so much the immediate effects, the gaps in the essential services, as the bonds of trust between strangers, neighbours, friends and even family dissolve, and it becomes a matter of kill first or be killed. Those affected by the Voices embark on a rampage, those unaffected hunker down, unable to group together in case they put themselves in danger.

Once it's over (but IS IT?) then, survivors wander the shattered remains of civilisation, seeking safety, shelter, and most of all - perhaps - meaning. Why did this thing happen? What comes next? Into the vacuum emerge cults, such that of the Flitting Man, whose spiral symbol is everywhere. Local warlords fight for territory and trade anything - including people - with one another.

It's a disjointed, scary background against which Todd has followed a scattered group, in particular, the troubled man Pilgrim, and Lacey, a young woman with whom he's travelled. In Survivors, we focus mostly on Pilgrim. For the first time we see his origins, and we also see his current life, including some vivid, nightmarish scenes where his very identity and nature is challenged. When the story proper opens (there is some prologue first) Pilgrim has just woken in an open grave and has no memory of who or where he is. The story then fills in details, but gradually and by jumping backwards and forwards.

If you're a fan of straightforward narratives you may find this a bit annoying (it didn't happen so much in the earlier books) but do persevere! I thought it wasn't going to work for me, but in fact it's a brilliant device. You will almost certainly be reading this book because you've read the previous two, but that probably means it's a little while since you did, and you may be hazy over the detail. How did Defender finish? Where was Pilgrim then? Who is Red? Who is Lacey, and what happened to her? All these names and events were in my mind somewhere, but also, not complete when I wanted them. There's a kind of fading in reading a series of books (unless you save them for one readathon) and a good author will work with that. Todd does. But not through a simple recap. Instead, here we have Pilgrim reconstructing not only his memory, but his identity. Todd makes it genuinely unclear who he is, lending a sinister light to all his exploration of her world, and we - the readers - don't know any better than him. Our sense of his history is rebuilt in the same way as his own.

So at times we have to trust (but who can we trust?) and at times, we think he's going wrong. The conditions and alliances in this world make it impossible to keep clean hands, impossible to separate "good" people from "bad". And remember, there are those Voices, which clearly have an agenda of sorts - theories about this and about the proper way to respond underlie much of the conflict in the book - so people here have an extra, hidden aspect (at least, those with Voices do - but again, can we trust someone who denies having a Voice?)

I don't want to make this book sound all tricksy and clever-clever. I think Todd does brilliantly match form to narrative, but even apart from this, Survivors is a vividly imaged story with well realised, involving characters set in a challenging and disturbing world. Pilgrim is a restless should, driven by a need to do - what exactly? Part of his frustration is understanding that. He thinks he has a purpose, responsibilities, duties, commitments, all lost in that void of his mind, and a great deal of his time is spent trying to understand them. But part of the risk of that all being so dark is, we don't know whether he is doing the right thing, guided by that lost part of himself, or whether he's being sidetracked by his history, experiences and attachments to things and people who are now gone.

Against that background it's genuinely affecting to see moments when he recovers something or, almost better, when an aspect of his past, a friend, rediscovers him (when you read the book you'll know what I mean) and also heartbreaking when he has to leave them behind again.

An explosive, engaging third part to this quadrilogy and one I'd urge you to get your hands on as soon as you can.

For more about this book, and for links to buy, see the publisher's website here.

The author's website is here.

Review - Hunted by GX Todd

Hunted (The Voices, 2)
G X Todd
Headline, 31 May 2018
HB, 496pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of Hunted (and - full disclosure - the previous book in this series, Defender, quotes my review).

Todd's previous book, Defender, was an outstanding example of post-apocalyptic storytelling - scary, searing and convincing. Hunted manages - and I don't know how she did this - to be better still. The story corps effortlessly from passages of grim realism, almost miniature documentaries on the breakdown of society under the onslaught of the "Voices", to dreamlike sequences threatening carnage and pain or moving passages showing how even in an upside-down world, love still endures.

The Voices brought death and destruction because they urged killing or self-killing. Those affected, even if they didn't commit violence, are deeply mistrusted by the survivors, tracked down, tortured and murdered. If you have a Voice you try to hide it.

Across a landscape of a ruined United States, we follow three groups of survivors trying, in their different ways, to live in this new, changed world. Posy leads a group of hunters, tracking the elusive woman Red. There is something a bit... off... about Posy, about his relationship with his own Voice, and with the terrible Flitting Man. He drives his ragtag team unmercifully, but his goal is obscure.

Albus and his group of survivors live at the inn by the Sea, hinted at in Defender. His abilities allow him to locate and save the lost and wandering, building a team that can travel in the nightmare world of these books - but again, why and for what purposes?

Lacey, Alex and Addison featured centrally in Defender and are in a sense the hinge of the book, fleeing across a cursed landscape (but escaping what? And going where?) They have made enemies, their friends are dead, but the three (two women and a girl) are coolly competent, survivors. They take some time to make their appearance, Todd holding back these most familiar - and most relatable - figures from the first book almost till the middle of Hunted and dwelling instead on Posy and Albus.

The stories of these groups are woven together into a complex timeline that isn't afraid to dip backwards and forwards. As a result there's a somewhat mythic sense, a distancing effect, through much of the book - seeing the aftermath of an awful event before the event itself both reassures (you know that everyone survived) and appals (when the event itself begins you know it will be bad because you've seen the post-trauma). At the same time, the dreaminess and a creeping understanding of the Voices (not complete, not yet, by any means) adds to the overall sense of gathering dread.

Todd is a brutal author. She holds little back when it comes to heaping suffering on or killing off her characters. Even the ordinary lives depicted here - I use that word advisedly - are bleak; doomed, starved, hopeless people shuffling through a withered, hopeless world. It isn't a zombie apocalypse by any means but the depth of suffering, the wrongness depicted here, is much, much worse making that almost seem like a cosy genre.

And as we see in Hunted the madness and destruction is not over, rather it's getting worse. More akin, perhaps, to Lord of the Flies than anything else I've read, the story takes a dark view of a humanity released from social conventions and tormented by apocalyptic, teasing, haunting visions.

While there are grains of hope here, the book can make for hard reading at times, but it is also at these times it's hardest to put down.

I know this book will stick with me. I'd strongly recommend you read it.

For more about Hunted see the publisher's webpage here. G X Todd's page is here.