Finding horror in a journo's notebook

What's in the water in Cape Town these days? Two of the hottest international reads of the last two years have sprung from the pens of young Cape Town women writing spooky thrillers.

Last year Lauren Beukes's The Shining Girls had readers around the world turning pages uncontrollably. This year it's Sarah Lotz's The Three that is raking them in.

The Three was always going to be big. The rights to the novel were snapped up for a reported six-figure deal, on the basis of only a 33-page manuscript. That's the dream for any writer, let alone a South African one, and if it added pressure to Lotz's writing process, it doesn't come through in the polished final product.

The defining, central event of The Three happens on January 12 2012. Four passenger planes crash within hours of each other. One goes down in Khayelitsha, Cape Town. Another is lost to a notorious "suicide forest" in Japan. A third hits the ground in Florida, US, and the fourth meets a watery end over Europe's coastline.

It's a premise that somehow feels chillingly plausible in a post-9/11 universe. Lotz couldn't have known, while she was writing it, that Malaysian Airline's Flight 370 would disappear from the skies just a few weeks before publication - but the coincidence adds an additional frisson to the reading.

In real life, what happened after 9/11? The war on terror was launched; a raft of anti-terror legislation was brought in almost overnight; US President George W Bush's approval rating soared; Afghanistan and Iraq were invaded. Those are some pretty significant geopolitical consequences.

Now imagine that the plane crashes were not limited to the US East Coast but took place across the globe - and no terrorist involvement was asserted.

How would the world make sense of these events? What kind of fallout would ensue?

This is the intriguing question that Lotz's novel skilfully explores. The work masquerades as the notes of a journalist investigating the crashes, and practically every chapter is in the form of a different textual artefact. There are transcripts of Skype conversations, newspaper articles, online chats and airline reports. It is no mean feat to dabble in so many genres, and Lotz manages it with aplomb.

Beyond this, she has ambitiously pegged her novel as taking place on four continents - meaning she has to authentically capture something of the language, culture and spirit of each place and its characters, from Bible-bashing US evangelicals to Japanese hikikomori (reclusive young men who spend all day online).

If an act of terror didn't bring down the four planes, what did? There are only two clues: the three children who survived the crashes against the odds, and a voicemail message left by a dying American. The children become the focus of obsessive media attention and adulation, but to their families there are signs that not everything is quite right.

When a US pastor suggests the three may be the horsemen of the Apocalypse, things begin to unravel in earnest.

Lotz builds and maintains a galloping pace, and a suspense that never flags.

If the novel's conclusion cannot quite support the tension of its build-up, that is the inevitable way of the horror genre: the journey is the destination.

Lotz will sell boatloads of The Three, and deservedly so. It is endorsed by no less a master than Stephen King himself, who called it "really wonderful". It's perfect under-the-blanket winter reading. Just not on a plane.

• 'The Three' is published by Hodder and Stoughton, available from Exclusive Books for R300