The Drive-in

Joe Lansdale

The is a short, fast paced novel which is every bit the B-movie its title suggests, like a frenetic sugar rush of a movie transferred to paper. No movie could really be like this though, not without sending its audience fleeing in madness from the stalls. Chaos and insanity reign. It begins quietly enough, with a bar brawl, with the only major scene set outside the location in which dominates the rest of the novel, the Drive-In. For those living outside the US this whole way of watching films is quite strange and unreal anyway, something only really represented on celluloid, which gives this novel an extra sheen of unreality.

The characters, B-movied up to their eyeballs, are attending an all-night horror movie screening, with a line up of notorious movies that most people will have heard of. They remain as a backdrop throughout the whole of the novel, from the time the strange meteor strikes, carrying them off to a very different place. From that time on the B-movie horrors are piled on until the climatic ending. It is very much in the same style as a certain element of Stephen King's writing, the moments when he spins off into some strange pop art world that is a subset of our own, leading to a novel like The Regulators - which postdates this one. They are in a similar style though, and this story seems to build on similar ideas to King novellas like The Langoliers or The Mist.

The novel is like living on fast food, sugary drinks and sweets, something that ties in with the existence of the characters within it. The length is just right, for like living on such a diet, you could only take so much before the overload of sugar drives you insane. This, more than anything else, offers a glimpse of what such an existence might lead to. If B-movie horror is your thing, if you can sit through hours of murder, cannibalism and decadance then this may well be your thing. If not, then you might want to give it a miss, other than as a guilty pleasure for which you need to hide the sweet wrapper evidence afterwards.