Five Survive

Jackson lays a tantalising trail from the very beginning: there are six friends in a camper van but the title starkly proclaims that only five of them survive. The story takes this blueprint as its modus operandi, confounding expectations, wrenching away from what is, at best, a tenuous reality for all those involved.

Red and her friends are travelling in the van to their holiday destination when they take a wrong turning and find themselves in a remote forest, with no phone signal and a flat tyre. Oliver, an alpha male from a wealthy and influential family, takes the lead in organising a change of tyre but as they begin to drive away someone hidden in the blackness all around them shoots out all four tyres. This is the beginning of a hostage situation and during the following 8 hours one of the group dies.

We see events through Red’s eyes, the eyes of an outsider, a young woman whose police captain mother was shot dead in the line of duty and whose father has descended into hopeless alcoholism as a result. Her own raw grief and feelings of guilt twist around the story, isolating her in their almost cinematic horror, blurring her ability to deal with relationships and echoed in the unfolding events.

Jackson drip-feeds the tension as the gunman reveals his demands and although this slows the momentum in some central sections of the story, elsewhere the twists and turns of the plot revive the pace of the action. The hidden gunman, eerily heard only through a walkie-talkie mysteriously attached to the exterior of the van, pressurises the protagonists to reveal the secret he needs with the threat of murder if they do not comply. This creates both a hierarchy of fear and a need for action and Oliver appoints himself leader. His character begins to lose credibility as his toxic masculinity asserts itself and he becomes a caricature, his outpourings often described as ‘roaring’ and his actions and reactions predictably extreme. Those who quail in the face of his anger are reduced to ciphers in the narrative at this point.

However, Jackson also offers the unexpected and the final section of the book grips as persuasively as the first, with shocks, reveals and an eventual high-tension conclusion. There is not simply an ending, but the possibility of a new beginning, too, giving a final puzzle for the reader to solve.