Book Notices | Run by Blake Crouch

Blake Crouch, Run

Amazon   Blake Crouch's Run was originally self-published in 2011 and has now been re-released by Ballantine in 2024. (This publishing history unfortunately is not apparent in the description of the book on Amazon.) So it's an earlier novel and not the product of the writer that Crouch has become in the more than ten years since Run first appeared. Back then, while I enjoyed some of the author's books, he was too focused on gore for my taste. I actually gave up reading him for a while because of this, and to my astonishment, when I looked again at what he was writing some years later, he was producing great novels like Recursion and Dark Matter. Anyway, Run is a product of that earlier time, and it is indeed a bit gory, but not as gory as some of his other early stuff. The book starts out slow, with a great deal of description about the burned-out towns and barren countryside through which our protagonist and his family are traveling as they try to survive a sort of murder plague. This opening part can seem endless, and maybe some of it could have been cut, but eventually the story takes off and the book becomes more interesting. And I'm willing to believe that maybe that less interesting stuff early on helps put readers in the right frame of mind to appreciate what Crouch's characters are going through. In short, this is definitely not one of Crouch's best books, but it's an okay read. Just don't abandon the author if you don't like this one, because his newer stuff is quite good.