Roadkill
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- ¥330
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- ¥330
発行者による作品情報
In the time of no time, in a year without number, a Chukchi shaman sees a vision in smoke. It causes him to tremble.
A hot young lawyer in heels and hose daydreaming about her playtime, a professor and his brood on an overdue vacation, a former star running back pushing sporting goods, a big rig driver on a last chance run—accidental travelers are sharing the same road in their ordinary lives. They aren’t going where they think. Soon they will share a nightmare.
In the Oregon backwoods, survivalist crazies swing pickaxes and sledges, hammering out their cave in the foothills. They go too far. Now there is something wheeling above them in the darkening sky. Something terrible.
On a godforsaken twisting strip of Oregon blacktop, the travelers are converging. A long-haul truck driver haunted by the bottle is trying his damnedest to stay dry. Somehow a young school girl is there like a vision in his rearview mirror, dropped into his personal circle of hell. The slick foggy road is climbing.
The nightmare is dropping from the cloud. It picks out motion, senses blood.
Kill, it knows. Nothing on that road will be the same. Kill. There is a shuddering drum beat of wings. The last chance run for all the travelers is only beginning.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Stretched across a bare-bones plot and energized by scenes of bloody mayhem, this horror tale from the author of The Calling lumbers about as gracelessly as the prehistoric birds of prey that rampage through it. These predators have been liberated from their ancient burial place by a pair of clumsy survivalists in the vanguard of the intruders developing and desecrating sacred Native American tribal grounds in the woods outside Portland, Ore. What these creatures signify and why they have emerged now are critical elements of a background that Sanford develops inadequately. Rather, he spends the bulk of the novel unfolding the lives of a handful of characters whose stories, for the most part, contribute little to the tale's progress before the characters are turned into bird feed. When three of the principals finally are brought together--a stubborn trucker, an adolescent girl and a nameless teen male protagonist--it seems for the sole purpose of staging a flashy yet nearly meaningless standoff against the birds. The narrative isn't helped by Sanford's prose, which is punchy but riddled with awkward phrases such as, ``Maniacs. They caused him to smolder within,'' and, ``He tried that perception on for awhile.'' Through no apparent design of its own, this novel proves that there's more to a good horror story than just an ugly monster.
