Coldbrook

I've had Tim Lebbon's Coldbrook on my to-read list for a while and, having finally made time to read it, I'm pleased to say it lived up my expectations, blending horror, SF and existential dread into a enjoyably dark thriller.

Deep beneath the Appalachian Mountains, the scientists of Coldbrook have finally managed to open a breach between the worlds of the multiverse. But despite their extensive precautions, a life-form crosses between the two universes carrying an appalling disease that makes its carriers appallingly difficult to kill. With the plague spreading rapidly through the facility, engineer Vic Pearson allows his fears for his family and his guilt about an affair to push him into bipassing Coldbrook's lockdown — allowing the the disease to escape into the wider world.

After the initial shock of the incursion at Coldbrook, the plot unfolds from the perspective of four different principal characters.

Jonah Jones, the septuagenarian Welsh scientist and driving intellectual force behind Coldbrook, remains behind in the ruins of his lab where he struggles to understand the horrors his work has unleashed. Initially he spends his time trying to get the word out and calling in favours from people he believes he may be able to help stop the progress of the disease. But gradually, as he finds himself haunted by visions of other parallel worlds that have succumbed to the plague, he begins to doubt his own sanity — during his attempt to clear Coldbrook of the infected, a process that involves shooting his former colleagues in the head, he wonders whether he hasn't lost his mind and gone on a shooting spree.

Holly Wright, an engineer on the project and Vic Pearson's former lover, is in Control when the initial breakthrough occurs. Finding herself trapped, she escapes the only way she can: through the breach into the world they've christened Gaia. Here she finds a parallel reality that shares much of the history of her own world but whose recent past has radically diverged from her own. Surrounded by people who echo some of the characters in her own universe, she learns that the wider multiverse is...

Vic Pearson, driven by the guilt of his action, gathers up his family and sets out on a road trip across the increasingly lawless US. Following directions from Jonah, he hooks up with a phorologist called Marc Dubois and starts working to track and defeat the plague. When Marc hears news of a possible clue to the nature of the disease, Vic & his family find themselves carried along on a crazy helicopter ride that promises to take them full circle back to where they started.

Jayne Woodhams, the only member of the central quartet not on staff at Coldbrook, is living an ordinary life that involves a difficult past and a strange degenerative disease that affects her mobility and which seems to be gradually getting its hooks into her consciousness. On the day everything changes, Jayne and her boyfriend are at a national park where they get a chance to see the savagery of the disease at close hand. Appalled, Jayne tries to flee to England but as the epidemic takes hold, she finds herself back in the US and besieged with only a sympathetic sky marshall for company.

Despite wearing the tropes of SF, Coldbrook is really a horror novel. The sciences of Coldbrook are also explained away with hand-waves about quantum theory, black holes, and antimatter, but again this doesn't really matter because the book is more interested in the differences between those who open windows to observe other worlds, those who intervene by opening doors between them.

The plague — a zombie epidemic, in case you hadn't guessed — is a bit of a McGuffin: it requires a bite to transmit, doesn't seem to be passed on through blood, and instantly transforms its victims from people into the living dead. This contrasts with the more rigourous treatment of a similar disease in, say, Seanan McGuire's (Mira Grant's) Newsflesh novels, but it doesn't really matter all that much because Lebbon's goal is to use the epidemic to explore the existential horror of his characters reactions to an implacable and inexplicable enemy.

Lebbon also imagines, as Camus does, that there might be those who benefit from the plague and who positively welcome it as way to achieve their own ends. But although we eventually get to see the collaborators' outer motives via Jonah's strange dreams and Kathryn Coldbrook's diary, their inner motives and desires remain hidden. Which is probably just as well because it's far worse to imagine the thoughts that might lead someone to destroy an infinity of parallel worlds whilst all the time believing, deeply and honestly, that they're doing the right thing.