WRITER: DAVID QUANTICK | PUBLISHER: TITAN BOOKS | RELEASE DATE: JUNE 9TH
It would be difficult to herald the premise of David Quantick’s new fantasy thriller Night Train as groundbreaking. A narrative that opens with a character waking up aboard a moving vehicle, with no memory of how they got there, or even of who they are, will win few awards for originality in genre fiction.
That sense of familiarity is offset in part by the atmospheric and intriguing setting. The story unfolds aboard a mysterious train, thundering along the tracks through an endless night, rarely slowing or stopping. The train is littered with corpses, explosions erupt in the skies above and a monster tries to tear its way into the carriages to slaughter the remaining passengers.
Trying to make sense of this bewildering situation is a young woman who comes to know herself as Garland. As she begins to make her way through the train, in the hope of finding answers and other survivors, Garland encounters a series of bizarre, macabre and alarming sights. Each carriage appears to have a unique layout and purpose, although the train designer’s intent remains unclear.
Quantick has clearly had fun thinking up the different freaky phenomena that Garland uncovers. He ensures that what’s hidden behind each new door remains genuinely hard to predict. There are some well-evoked surprises along the way, as Quantick reveals the on-board shenanigans with a good deal of creative ingenuity.
Yet even as Garland learns that she is not alone, many of those discoveries come across as somewhat arbitrary – distracting attention from the business of solving the central mystery.
The book’s setting is intentionally claustrophobic and, as the train clatters along the tracks, there’s a rhythmic sense of motion towards some final destination. All of which gives the story a strong sense of drive and of tension. But Quantick seems determined to continually slow the pace. Too much time is spent depicting his characters’ reactions to the endless succession of weird and dysfunctional rolling stock they’re passing through. The three flashback ‘interludes’ tease at a wider backstory, but there’s still too little urgency about moving this railtrack conundrum towards an endpoint. Some 250 pages in, there is a settling of accounts through some careful exposition. This unearths some inventive world-building shocks, but at a point when there’s no time left to make anything much out of them.
Quantick’s novel is very far from being a train-wreck, but as anyone who’s found themselves endlessly wandering through the carriages of an InterCity 125 in search of the buffet car or the ticket inspector will attest: sometimes it really is about the destination and not the journey.
