Road To Nowhere
author: Christopher Pike
name: Paul
average rating: 3.44
book published: 1993
rating: 2
read at: 2011/10/26
date added: 2011/10/26
shelves: horror, novel, young-adult
review:
It’s a little difficult for me to judge Christopher Pike‘s young adult suspense novels. I read them occasionally because my wife grew up with them, loved them, continually re-reads them for comfort and I like to have a frame of reference for an important part of her formative years. Some of them have been decent to good, but a few that I’ve started and never finished have read a bit too much like low-budget after-school specials crossed with The Outer Limits.
Road to Nowhere is the story of Teresa, recently betrayed by a boyfriend she thought she would love forever, fleeing from her problems and her old life. As she drives north on California’s coastal highway she picks up two curious hitchhikers and to pass the time the three of them begin to tell stories; Teresa tells of her heartbreak at the hands of her boyfriend and best friend, while the strangers, Poppy Corn and Freedom Jack, weave a conflicted tale of star-crossed lovers.
There’s not much mystery to the plot twists, each of which are broadcast practically via bullhorn from very near the outset. That alone wouldn’t make the story awkward but the fact that the events that make up the bulk of the narrative (that is, the parts that aren’t story-within-story) are essentially meaningless sucks much of the heft from the final chapters. Everything is pat and neat at the end, there seems to be no consequence to any action and as a result there is a pervasive sense of futility to finishing the book. The clumsy morality that serves as the late-breaking central theme is grossly ineffective here and even the lame stab at sentimentality is almost funny rather than touching.
That all said, one aspect that salvages Road to Nowhere from the trashbin is the inner tale of John and Candy as related by Poppy and Free, told with campfire-esque salaciousness in a banter-y style over the course of the first 2/3rds of the book. It is this telling that really propels the book—and far more than the drab tale of Teresa and Bill—enough so that by the end I wished Pike had ditched the structure and re-written Candy and Jack’s tale, leaving out the encompassing parts that don’t work.