HIGHWAY 28 WEST

by Joe Taylor ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 2023

A man journeys along a nightmarish path in Taylor’s experimental novel.

Highway 28 West is a desolate place. It’s a stretch of road where “everything takes at least two hours or two days or two months or two years longer than it should,” as one resident puts it. “Unless it’s something bad, and then it happens a lot quicker than it should…” Along its winding route are trailer parks, ponds, and houses of worship like the Eternal Truth of Jesus Christ on Calvary Church. It’s home to vultures, roadkill, 18-wheelers hauling pine, and, in the winter, enough snow to strand a traveler in his tracks. That’s what happens to Preacher. Preacher isn’t really a preacher—he goes by a nickname he picked up in high school. His actual beliefs about God—or anything else for that matter—are rather ambivalent. When his pick-up truck stalls on the snowy highway, he approaches a trailer home to ask to use the phone and interrupts a couple in the midst of a screaming match. The wife invites Preacher to stay for coffee while the man steps away to sneak some whiskey in the bathroom. The wife takes the opportunity to seduce Preacher, then tells him of her plan to murder her husband with the shotgun hanging above the fireplace. Fleeing the trailer and impending murder, Preacher visits another one nearby, where a woman cares for her sick husband and son. The very next day, after getting his truck fixed, Preacher wanders into the Eternal Truth of Jesus Christ on Calvary Church only to discover a joint funeral for the boy and his father. These are just the first of several strange encounters Preacher experiences driving up and down Highway 28 West. He also finds a pit-bull puppy and a dead man, takes a job at a boxing plant, fails to help two teenagers drowning in a pond, and witnesses a mass shooting at a high school pep rally.

The novel is formatted like a play: Preacher recounts his adventures as monologues delivered to a crowd of people, many of whom have heard aspects of the story from other sources. They shout out comments, observations, and critiques of Preacher’s storytelling ability (during the telling of the anecdote about the arguing couple, one crowd member shouts, upon learning of the shotgun, “Just shoot the damn thing!”). Some members of the crowd have distinct personalities, like Lizzie, the “Girl Poet in Crowd,” who offers cryptic verses now and again between Preacher’s speeches. The stories Preacher tells are hard to make sense of—they have the fluidity and ambiguity of religious allegory, and both Preacher and the crowd often have difficulty assessing their meaning; the format itself adds an additional layer of abstraction. Preacher sometimes tells his stories in the first person, sometimes in the third, and there’s a slipperiness to the time and setting. Fans of Samuel Beckett and other aggressively postmodern writers may enjoy picking apart the layers of Preacher’s dreamlike soliloquies, but most readers will probably be left baffled by this difficult-to-parse work.

An ominous, often alienating piece of experimental fiction set along a hellish highway.

Pub Date: May 15, 2023

ISBN: 9781952386602

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Sagging Meniscus Press

Review Posted Online: April 21, 2023

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories: LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION