Run, Blake Crouch

Don’t waste your time with Run by Blake Crouch. Or with reading this entire review, since the novel can be summarized in just a few words: underdeveloped characters whose fate you’ll struggle to care about, a shallow plot, and an excessive amount of vividly described ritualistic violence and gore. Well… perhaps the last part might catch your attention. But let’s try again and talk a bit more about the actual story.

A mysterious celestial phenomenon known as “Aurora” triggers mass killings across the United States. People who claim to have “seen the lights” suddenly become convinced that it is their mission to execute everyone who has not. Civilization quickly collapses into a brutal, disconnected world where survival depends entirely on instinct, luck and endurance.

The Cullcrow family — Jack, his wife Dee, and their children Cole and Naomi — are forced to flee their home in Albuquerque, New Mexico. With no real destination or plan, they wander across a devastated America while being hunted by heavily armed fanatics who leave ghost towns and destruction behind them.

Much of the first half of the novel unfolds inside their vehicle, where Jack’s driving skills repeatedly become the only thing standing between the family and death. Later come exhausting mountain crossings without food or water, where any hope of rescue feels increasingly impossible.

At first glance, the novel seems to draw inspiration from Darwinian ideas about natural selection and human survival under extreme pressure — a concept that could have elevated the story significantly. Unfortunately, the execution never reaches that level.

Cole and Naomi spend large portions of the book either unconscious or passive, Jack improvises solutions no matter how hopeless the situation becomes, and Dee is mostly reduced to the role of “the worried mother trying to protect her family.”

The Cullcrows are far from a perfect family, and the apocalypse clearly functions as an opportunity for emotional reconciliation — a thematic direction Blake Crouch would later revisit far more successfully in Dark Matter.

And that is perhaps the biggest issue with Run. Despite the constant action scenes, endless travel and brutal encounters, the novel somehow feels painfully repetitive. The same emotional beats, the same survival patterns and the same types of danger repeat over and over again until the story loses much of its impact.

BOOKLOVERS rating: 2 out of 5 stars.

Run was Blake Crouch’s debut novel, and his talent is undeniably visible even here. But overall, this feels more like an early draft of ideas he would later execute far better in his stronger works. Had this been the first book of his I’d ever read, I honestly doubt I would have given him a second chance.