I received an e-book ARC copy of Night Train from NetGalley and Titan Books in return for my honest review, which follows below. I thank both for this opportunity.

The opening scene gives us promises of a tense and secretive read. A person wakes up confused of who they are and where they are, not a great way to to start the day. Fighting her way to a door, she becomes aware that she is stuck on a moving train, not much of an improvement in my opinion. She begins moving in the direction she hopes will lead to the front of the train, passing through train cars carefully and fearfully. She meets another person, a man who claims to have been surviving on the train for more than a month, if his calculations could be in any way correct.

Each train car that they enter is different, some are buffet cars that offer limited types of food, while others range from common train cars to outright bizarre configurations. The windows will sometimes show explosions, ash raining down like snow, or lakes of fire below the tracks. None of this helps them remember. And the story continues from there but I don’t want to give away spoilers.

So the obvious comparisons for me are the graphic novel, turned movie, soon to be television series Snowpiercer and the horror movie series Cube. There are traps and wrong choices to be made while traveling the train length, which is reminiscent of the Cube franchise. In those people would wake up in a room, usually with some memory loss, and have to find their way out of connecting rooms. Some are safe to enter, some are booby trapped, there was some math involved in solving it, or trick to making it through safely. They were fun, slightly campy movies, with unique ways to mess people up. Snowpiercer was an apocalyptic world setting, with a train that runs a continuous track, stuffed chock full with the surviving humanity. But class snobbery still exists, because why not?!, so there are poor people living in filth eating cricket bricks and rich people eating sushi and drinking booze.

This book felt like it took the middle road in plot from these two, a blend that was unique yet familiar. What fell a little flat for me was the character dialogue, at times it seemed like it tried to be jocular but didn’t read sincere. It also could be awkward when more than two people would be talking, it could become difficult to tell who was speaking. There was also a stretch in the last part of the book where a few sentences seemed to be out of place, making the story feel fractured. Unless it was on purpose. I think it may be a printing error, it may be fixed by the release date. An example without using actual text; a question would be answered in paragraph one, without a speaking source given, but the question would not be asked until paragraph two. It made it difficult to read for several pages.


I thought it was an interesting story, I give it 3 stars because I enjoyed most of my time reading it. I would suggest it to people to read, my issue with the dialogue is my issue, others may not agree with me of course. Some of the later chapters felt clunky and out of sorts, but again, I don’t know if that will be present in the final release, or if it is a reading style I just didn’t get.

This didnt really work for me. I am not really into Sci fi fiction but I'd thought i would give it a try. IT was too mucg going on for me and the ending was lackluster.

‘Night Train’ by David Quantick was not on my radar at all, until I saw Tony Jones comment on a Twitter thread or Facebook post that he was reading it and was really enjoying it.

I jumped onto Netgalley to take a look and was intrigued by the cover, the synopsis but also the endorsement by Neil Gaiman. I was a bit worried about requesting it through Netgalley, as I’d been turned down more times than approved, so I kept my hopes low. When I got the notification that I had been approved, I was so excited! I dove into this one right away.

What I liked: ‘Night Train’ is just that – a locomotive out of control, barrelling down the tracks. This book was equal parts ‘Snowpiercer’ and ‘1984.’ We are introduced to a woman, who awakens on a train. She has no idea how or why she is there and is even unsure of who she is. From there Quantick creates a truly engrossing and engaging claustrophobic story. I couldn’t stop reading this one. Usually I have five or six books on the go, but once I started this one, I had to read it before anything else. I wanted to know just what the heck was going on, who these characters were and as we begin to learn more and more about the back story, the world outside of the train and speed towards the finale, I was pulled in harder and harder.

Quantick has an Emmy win for his work on ‘Veep’ which means a lot of this is dialogue driven, which worked really well. The banter between the three characters that are ultimately introduced was fantastic and made them that much more relatable, especially as their individual back stories are shared.

The train itself, while not fully a character as the setting, also brings an added element. Truthfully, I sometimes get turned off by stories purely centered on action on trains, simply because that’s it, there is nowhere else to go, but Quantick quickly dispelled any reservations I had.

Lastly, the things that are encountered on the various train cars are fantastic and with the way this book ended, I sure hope we get a follow up.

What I didn’t like: One thing this book is lacking is ‘definitive answers.’ Ultimately, I think this will be the thing that will sway a reader whether they loved this book or it wasn’t for them. I ate it up, but that was the biggest thing I kept repeating to myself – I wanted just a bit more information, a bit more definition or details.

Why you should buy this: Titan Books continue to put out some truly stunning works and ‘Night Train’ is another fantastic addition. This book was thoroughly engrossing and as mentioned before, I simply couldn’t put it down. The characters were great and the dystopian/apocalyptic world outside of the train was mesmerizing. This was a winner from page one all the way until the end.

If you read this, please do me a favor - just enjoy it. Go along for the ride. Don't sit and think and think and try to figure everything out. Yes, it's sci fi and mystery but it's a weird, unique novel and I think it's best read as what it is.

I like David Quantick as a music writer, and have seen his dry and very fast wit well represented in his TV comedy writing work (I know he did a lot of the heavy lifting of TV Burp which is not an easy gig). So I was interested in this dystopian sci-fi novel from him, which I assumed would be a blackly comic romp. Well its a romp, and there are gags in it (kudos for the Stations Of The Cross becoming the Stations Of The Very Angry), but this did not really work for me. Whilst its got gonzo ideas to spare, and starts with a solid bang* the plot and setting makes little sense, even when the god character turns up and explains everything. Its episodic, visual and reminded me of nothing more than the outline for a 90's 2000AD script where satire battles with the need for a cliffhanger every five pages.

The Night Train is a train which our heroine Garland wakes up on. Its empty, except a carriage full of dead people. It doesn't stop, but outside is some sort of hellish landscape. She soon comes across Banks in a buffet car (Quantick puts a lot of buffet cars in his train to allow for exploration), a gruff man who remembers his past well enough but not the past well enough to recognise that the two of them are named after SF authors (initially I though Garland was Judy, considering mysterious waking up is very Dorothy). After a few monsters on the train they come across Poppy a superpowered cyborg teen skier (cue flashbacks), and nothing really makes any sense after this. I understand that the train is a metaphor - I've seen Snowpiercer - but it is also a train. So carriages with bizarre monsters in, traps, clones, more buffet cars all sort of mean something. But it is mainly for stuff to happen before we get to the revelation which tries to sell the line that in an endless war the safest place to be is on a constantly moving train. If I learnt anything from watching Lost is that the longer you set up a meaningful mystery the more the revelation has to make sense. In this one it is unclear the timeline of events, how many people are left in the world, the level of technology (we have cyborg skier but train...?) It feels cobbled together from lots of other dystopias without too much naturalisation - I do not need everything to be explained but when you add a character in to explain it well he has to convince. Best read as for the moments of light wit, and if you like sweary gorey carnage - but even then I would probably direct you to better 2000AD strips.


*Its not his fault that its the second book I have read in a fortnight where a female protagonist wakes up with no memory. But it does now feel a bit of a hackneyed way of letting me know the protagonist was a baddie in the past and I want you to have some sympathy before you discover who they are.

[NetGalley ARC]

Sometimes you find a hidden gem. I requested this book from the publisher who kindly provided it to me. Let me say that I’m super thrilled I found out about David Quantick’s Night Train!

The plot sounded really promising to me. First of all, it’s labelled a dystopian/horror/science-fiction. I do enjoy a good horror novel every now and then. It doesn’t always have to take place in realistic setting. Believe me, this one is not (I hope). Secondly, it takes place on a train. There’s something about horror stories that take place in one location that scare the heck out of me.

I will post my full review closer to the release date.

I can honestly say that it wasn't the cover of this book that drew me in, and that's a rarity! After reading the synopsis, I was ready for an incredible horror novel. This is not that. Night Train is more sci-fi/fantasy/mystery, and I think the reader is supposed to try and figure out the hook, but that was not possible for me. I was lost most of the time. A amnesiac woman awakens in a train car with a bunch of dead bodies. She remembers nothing, not even her name. I can't go further than that or I might spoil something. The author of Night Train is David Quantick, an award winning screenwriter for the show Veep.
You can certainly tell that by the cinematic qualities of certain scenes. Overall, this book was not what I expected, and so it soured me a little toward the story, but I can still recommend it to people who are looking for a crazy book that will REALLY keep you guessing.

I was provided a review copy of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.
Thank you to Titan and Netgalley

I have to be honest, when I read the synopsis and saw the cover for David Quantick's Night Train I was expecting something of a horror book. The dark and moody cover and the description of waking up on a train surrounded by dead people definitely gave it more of a horror feel, but after a while it slowly emerged that I'd had the genre completely wrong. Night Train is more of a science fiction dystopia story, though it takes its time in revealing this.

The majority of the story is more concerned with the central characters than the world they inhabit, apart from a few fleeting moments and a handful of flashbacks you never even see this world. The story is about the train and the people inside it.

The lead character is a woman without memory of who she is of how she got inside the train. She finds herself in a carriage surrounded by dead bodies, but can't find any clues that can help her. She even seems to have lost the ability to read, and looking at writing gives her awful headaches, so the small scraps of newspaper that she finds can't even help. Luckily, she soon comes across Banks, a man in a similar jumpsuit to hers, who also woke up on the train without any memory. Luckily, however, he can read the name on her jacket, and tells her she's called Garland.

Together Garland and Banks work their way through the train, moving from one strange carriage to the next, trying to find answers to the mysteries that plague them.

And that's about all that I'm going to say about the plot, and anything else would really be giving too much away, and even now I kind of feel like I might have revealed too much. Night Train is about the sense of mystery that surrounds the characters. They don't know anything, and we're in the exact same boat as them. Occasionally we will get some answers, some background information or clues to the world, but these happen to us as they happen to the characters, and we don't end up knowing more than they do.

The book throws a lot at both readers and the characters, and at one point in the book its stated that each carriage is a clue to what's going on, but I have to be honest, that statement doesn't really help too much. Thinking back on what I saw throughout the book with the knowledge I had at the end I don't see how us, or Garland, were supposed to reach that conclusion with the clues provided. Perhaps more information would have presented itself if the characters had investigated more, but this doesn't really happen. So because of that I'd advise to not try to figure out too much of what's going on. You won't predict everything that happens, and you won't know everything until its spelled out for us.

I have to admit, this did annoy me a little. A good mystery presents you with clues that will help you to figure out what's going on. A big bit of the fun is trying to figure out the answers to the puzzle. When half of the clues that you need to find those answers are held back it becomes almost pointless to try to find those answers, sadly, you're not told that this is the case until the end, and by then you're just being told the solution.

The book is also very light on details. We don't get a lot of insight into the characters or why they're doing what they're doing. I know that they don't have their memories at the start of the book, and that's fine, we don't need to get their entire back story, but some insight into how their mind is working would have been nice. We don't get this, we don't get to see how this situation is affecting them, or what their thought processes are, we just have to see them reacting in sometimes very odd ways. Their are times where the tings that the characters say and do don't quite make much sense, and seem to go against who they've been established as so far, and I can't help but think a little bit of insight into their mind would help with this.

I think this is something of a byproduct of the the fact that the book is written from a very detached third person point of view. I get why Quantick would want to do this. Their are points where the characters split up, or we get flashbacks, so a first person story wouldn't work with this in mind if the narrator was Garland for example. However, a third person perspective can still occasionally delve inside the characters heads.

Their were times that I didn't quite like the story being told here, where I found Quantick's style of writing, where he shifted between characters and locations from sentence to sentence made it a little hard to follow. At times the book felt like something of a dream, and some of the moments seemed to have a disjointed quality to them when it changed from scene to scene. This might not be for everyone, but it certainly gave the book its very own feel.

I really enjoyed David Quantick’s 2019 book ‘All My Colours’, a trippy horror novel which reminded me of a funnier Stephen King. His new book, ‘Night Train’, has some of the same strengths but doesn’t manage to come together into such a satisfying whole.
Like ‘All My Colours’, ‘Night Train’ reads a bit like an episode of ‘The Twilight Zone’. It takes a simple but intriguing idea and develops on it. In this case it starts with a woman with amnesia, Garland, who wakes up to find herself on a mysterious train. The train is rushing through a nightmarish landscape and as Garland explores it she meets a giant man, Banks, and a childish young woman, Poppy. It’s probably worth noting that the train is also filled with corpses and weird creatures.
The three characters are very different, but equally engaging. The way they spark off each other is a lot of fun to read. The book has some brilliantly funny dialogue, as you’d expect from a TV comedy writer with as impressive a resumé as Quantick’s. Unfortunately the sci fi elements of the book aren’t handled as skilfully, and the storytelling is a bit lacking. There is a plot, of sorts, with the origins of the train and the world around it gradually revealed as the book progresses. This is largely done through a series of flashbacks where the trio remembers bits of their pasts. Mostly, though, the novel consists of the characters encountering increasingly weird situations and cracking wise about them. It’s entertaining to read, but it feels like a momentary diversion rather than a book with any real substance.
What makes that disappointing is that ‘All My Colours’ was so much better. It pulled off that difficult trick of being both extremely enjoyable to read and feeling like it had something important to say. It dug into the psyche of its protagonist in a way that ‘Night Train’ doesn’t even attempt and also explored the creative process. By comparison, the newer book is just a fun read. It’s witty and gripping, but insubstantial.

I’d never heard of the author before, but the premise intrigued me, so I decided to have a read. This is not the book I was expecting. The cover and even the blurb make it sound like an average (I mean that in a nice way) horror novel. This unique book ticks the box for many genres including horror, science fiction and dystopian. There are moments at first when I didn’t think it’d like the book which is one long journey as various characters try and get to the front of the train to speak to or see the driver. However, it’s so well written I soon tuned into the book and it grew on me. I just really wanted to know what was going on and kept been pulled further and further into the bizarre story. I will definitely read more by this author.

Night Train is David Quantick’s fourth novel since 2016 and a notable change of literary direction as he is much better known as a journalist and screenwriter of some note, which includes winning at Emmy in 2015 for Veep. Other fascinating credits include writing for the famous, but sadly defunct, British alternative music magazine NME and authoring a biography on the punk band The Clash. However, the reason I hold Quantick in such high esteem is because of one of his minor projects is very close to my heart. In 2007 he produced a BBC radio show called Reality is an Illusion Caused by a Lack of NF Simpson, which was a documentary about an obscure but very influential absurd playwright. I was a massive fan of NF Simpson, even meeting the great man, attended an early reading of his final play at the Royal Court Theatre and the tribute at the same theatre after his death in 2011. I always appreciated David Quantick for his tribute to the mighty NF Simpson.

Simpson was an absolute master of the absurd and I have a feeling he might rather have enjoyed Night Train as there is plenty of absurdity on offer in this very strange novel. It is one of those books which will probably be called ‘high concept’ and is likely to split the critics, I had great fun with it, but I am certain many others may hate it and find it frustrating. Although it has elements of horror, it also takes in science fiction, thriller, and dystopian fiction. In parts, it was also very funny, but again, the sly humour may pass many readers by.

Appropriately, for a novel called Night Train, the whole 400 pages is one long journey and apart from a few interludes is set entirely on the train. A very long train. Actually, I cannot stress how long this train is, as the three main characters spent much of the 400 pages talking along it trying to reach the driver. I kept on expecting this concept to become tiresome, but even though the action is slightly one paced Quantick held my interest and I was 100% invested in figuring out what on earth was going on. That was one of the most entertaining aspects of the story, which both revealed its secrets very slowly and along the way kept throwing curveballs, which often did not make a lot of sense.

Night Train opens with a woman waking up on a moving train and does not remember who she is, how or why she is there. In the same carriage there are fifteen dead people she does not recognise, seeking answers she decides to start moving up the train. It takes a while for the reader to figure out what is going on, so I would suggest not bothering trying to puzzle out the plot, but just go with the flow with the woman who thinks her name is Garland. Hell, she is even more confused than the reader!

Soon Garland meets Banks, who believes he has been on the train for quite a while, there is no night and day, the train never stops, he never sees any other passengers and believes he has been given a face transplant of some kind. Although neither of them have any memories, they do remember snatches from whatever happened before they arrived on the train. Soon they meet a third person, a young woman called Poppy and that is when the real fun starts as they continue to travel up the incredibly long train.

As the three battled along the train I had a feeling that this novel would rise or fall depending on the quality of the ending. A misfire would leave readers feeling cheated and taint all the slow build up which had preceded it, but I felt Quantick pulled it off, blending bizarre science fiction with a dash of dystopia, George Orwell style. I also enjoyed the interludes which involved the strange technical world of games, puzzles and computers in a setting that reminded me of Bletchley Park, set in an alternative reality.

David Quantick obviously enjoyed leading the reader down the train tracks with this surreal, yet very clever read. Setting a novel entirely on a train was difficult to pull off, but there is enough imagination in the breadcrumbs dropped along the way to keep the reader invested. I am not sure whether I entirely understood this quirky thriller, but then again, I am not sure whether I was supposed to. If you are a fan of cryptic science fiction and do not mind being led down the garden path then consider buying a ticket for the Night Train, I would not bother with a return ticket, as there is a good chance you will not be around to cash it in!

There’s not much you can say about ‘Night Train’ past the initial setup that won’t spoilt the journey that David Quantick takes you on. A woman wakes up in a moving train carriage, she doesn’t remember who she is, how or why she is there, she has to move forward to uncover any answers.

What I will say about Night Train is that it is one of the most unique books I’ve read, when reading its best to not try and figure out the puzzle of a plot but just enjoy the trip. They say never judge a book by its cover and this is especially true here; it look more like a standard horror novel than it actually is, in fact it’s more akin to a twisted sci-fi tale that Douglas Adams could have penned, its punchy and smart, has the bite and chuckles that you’d expect from someone who worked on TV shows like Brass Eye, Spitting Image or Charlie Brooker's Wipe (I feel like Mr Brooker especially would enjoy this one).

Highly recommended to anyone who enjoys clever science fiction.

I found this quite a difficult book to read. It reads quite staccato and there doesn’t appear to be much Flow between the sentences, whichpulled me from the story. I very often Felt lost with what was happening and unfortunately, it didn’t hold my interest.

Absolutely brilliant. 

Read in one sitting this is an amazingly crazy yet extremely clever read, surreal and wonderfully descriptive with an imaginative premise and a very visual feel to the prose. 

Full review for publication but definitely highly recommend.