THREE DAYS IN NOVEMBER

Despite the clanging uproar of its subject, this disaster tale of icebound Thanksgiving highways is a fast trip to Inertia, with a layover in Dullsville. For season's openers, two lamebrained deer hunters find they have a live deer in their back seat as they're barreling toward a mountain tunnel. They sideswipe a VW off the mountain, cause two tractor-trailers behind them to collide at the tunnel's mouth, and soon 84 cars are piled up with dead or wounded drivers. And the tunnel is an inferno, with the nearby town of Somerston in danger. While Lee David Rider, Chief of Communications for the Western Pennsylvania pikes, tries to clear up the horror, we meet various stranded motorists and their melodramatic reasons for being on the road. Like Evan J. and his daughter Em, who are hammerfooting their Peterbilt after the man who cut Evan's second wife's throat. Or depressed Dan Braden, Jr., who's trundling his wife Irene and their kids from Maryland to their home in Detroit. Meanwhile, the airwaves crackle with CB jargon, via drivers of snow-fighting equipment, firefighters, weathermen, and police. The tunnel fire is at last snuffed out by plowing the entrance full of snow, but a white-hot power cable drops onto a gigantic butane truck, and it sets Somerston aflame. By disaster's end, the frozen dead are stacked everywhere, along highway and in tunnel. Busy and boring.