SHOCK reviews Eric Red’s blistering road horror novel WHITE KNUCKLE.
Calling writer/director Eric Red the king of “Highway Horror” is appropriate. Witness some of his earliest and best known credits, serving as screenwriter for Robert Harmon’s blistering 1986 meditation on masculinity and violence THE HITCHER and Katherine Bigelow’s 1987 neo-western vampire drama NEAR DARK. Both films see men – and women – commandeering machines, marauding down the dusty desert highways in search of prey. Said villains become almost linked to their gas-belching automobiles and indeed, the power of these two pictures is akin to Richard Matheson and Steven Spielberg’s DUEL, albeit one in which we actually get to know the human monsters behind the wheel.
Red has also had a good run as a director, with clever, stylish films like BODY PARTS, COHEN AND TATE and the recently re-released werewolf shocker BAD MOON under his belt. But, oh, what a pleasure it is to simply read Red. To hang with him in his native habitat, on the page, navigating words without worry or commercial filmmaking concerns.
Red’s latest novel is called WHITE KNUCKLE (buy it here) and it delivers exactly what its title promises. It’s a blistering, breathless page turner, hard-boiled, brutally violent and yet totally character driven. A mean, smart and often harrowing gasoline-soaked work.
The book begins on the highway, Red’s highway, at night, with a tired nurse making the long drive home. Red puts us inside her head, giving us a taste of her life, her anxieties and dreams, but he does it economically, giving us just enough to care about this woman while he masterfully begins constructing the horror around her. As trucks barrel past her, rattling both her tiny car and her nerves, a roaring semi suddenly approaches, toying with her and eventually sending smashing off the road into the ditch. As the asshole speeds off into the ether, our heroine collects herself and attempts to call for help.
But then, the truck comes back.
Turns out this rig is manned by a serial killer, a psychopath who has christened himself “White Knuckle” and who has been pulverizing asphalt all over the country, stalking and slaughtering women and dumping their violated bodies miles away from their kill spots. He’s been at this some time, enough so that the FBI has a task force out to stop him. Said unit is led by agent Sharon Ormsby, who after coming up empty time and time again, opts to go undercover as a trucker and track the lunatic where he “lives”.
Related: Read our interview with Eric Red about werewolf classic BAD MOON
The Matheson connection doesn’t halt with easy DUEL comparisons, either. If you’ve read much Matheson (and if you haven’t, do so immediately), there’s an unpretentious practicality about his writing, an eloquence and poetry that hides within the everyday that has been endlessly imitated but never quite matched. Stephen King might have been called the successor to Matheson, but he has long tended to be long-winded, a self proclaimed “putter inner” and often this larding of superfluous detail hampers the storytelling. Red is much closer to matching that Matheson voodoo, spinning many plates at once and saying more in a few paragraphs about action and character and mood and tension that most writers cannot muster in a chapter.
WHITE KNUCKLE is an easy read, but it hits hard and, despite its wincing violence and often vulgar dialogue, is anchored in empathy. We get to know the victims. We mourn their senseless murders. There is meaning behind the carnage.
We cannot recommend this one enough and we’re very pleased to be living in a world where Red continues to spin his (Jack the) ripping yarns.
