The Survivor

The Survivor is a novel by the English writer James Herbert, published in 1976. A film version directed by David Hemmings followed in 1981.

The book opens with the aftermath of one of the worst air crashes in the country's history, in which the crew and passengers are killed and the few people on the ground who saw it are left with the wreckage. David Keller, the pilot, walks away from the crash as the only survivor, and the novel follows what happens to him afterwards: the official inquiry, the attention of the public, and his own conviction that the dead have not finished with him. A clairvoyant who claims to be in contact with the victims approaches him, and the investigation becomes a question about what actually happened on board. Herbert wrote the novel about an ordinary man and a very public disaster, and the ordinary commercial world of the period, with its tabloids and its insurance men, is as present in the book as the supernatural.

Herbert had published The Rats in 1974 and was one of the most widely read English horror novelists of the period, writing about disasters and hauntings inside contemporary settings rather than gothic ones.