14. The Three - Sarah Lotz

The day became known as "Black Thursday". It was the day when four passenger aircraft crashed - one in the USA, one in Japan, one in Europe and one in Africa. There should have been no survivors, except there was - three children.

Noone quite knows how these three children survived when noone else did but this book within a book aims to provide answers. Although a fiction book, it's written as a documentary-style book which "interviews" those related to the survivors, crash victims and others involved to help tell the story of what really happened in the wake of these plane crashes. While the style of writing is interesting - its the sort of thing you'd expect to be written after a disaster of this sort, it kind of makes it hard to get immersed in the story and really feel the drama. Sometimes I did find myself lost in the intensity of the situation but the short, jumpiness of the interviews and snippets breaks you out of it.
Part of the reason it was sometimes hard to follow is that it jumps from one survivors story to the other which means you get into one aspect of the story before it swiftly moves on to someone else.

I did find the story to be believable in the way the outside world reacted to the crisis - for example, one of those super crazy cult style "end of times" pastors from the USA brands the survivors as the harbingers of the apocalypse and the coming of the antichrist. He starts a campaign which gains steam and spreads across the world. As time goes on, those living with the surviving children start to feel like something isn't quite right...

This book definitely had me gripped - it was really hard to put down! It was also incredibly realistic  and I could definitely believe some of the incidents and feelings people had after the crisis. Lotz builds up the tension and the creepy, unnatural goings on surrounding "The Three". It's described as a horror but it's more of a religious-supernatural thriller.

I don't really want to go to far into the story of the book and how it ends because I think it would spoil things for those who want to read it. One thing I don't like, and seems to be a common opinion on goodreads, is that the ending is quite ambiguous and leaves things totally unexplained which is ok in some books, as I like deciding for myself what happens but in this story, I wanted to know exactly what was going on! However, let's just say it doesn't really end well.

Overall I definitely recommend reading this book and finding out for yourself the story of "The Three". If you do read it, let me know what you think was going on!