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Freeway
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 27, 2026
Reading my friends’ recent reviews of this novel brought back a particular memory of the pandemic. Nothing was scarier than late 2020, as the daily-reported L.A. casualty figures steadily rose in the various boroughs, drawing ever closer to our neighborhood. I'd lay awake at night, in the eerie quiet of no night traffic, then, from miles away, I’d hear some hotrod gunning it; speeding up and down, back and forth, angrily shifting gears, squealing around turns, slooowly getting closer, until they blew past our windows overlooking Olympic Boulevard at 70, 80, or 90 MPH, followed by another fifteen minutes as that one defiant rebel engine graaaadually faded away.
Later that year, the late-night car club rallies started; lines of fifteen to twenty cars snaking past, then returning twenty minutes later going the opposite way. At no time were any of these curfew-breakers chased by the cops. I never heard a siren, or saw a chopper. The road warriors owned the night, and I did wonder about them. Did they follow a route, or was it the thrill of the open range? Could be a short story there! Like Bradbury’s “The Foghorn,” only instead of the mournful call of the lighthouse, it was the distant, persistent whine of a high-performance engine luring the unwary to their doom. I tried a few plots, but eventually gave up. Any attempt to explain the haunting roar made it banal. It was a vibe, not a story. A future urban myth.
My buddies Mike and Jordan both note in their reviews that FREEWAY is more contemplative than the pulp cover and story blurb suggest, but I was still expecting a fairly standard seventies thriller. Someone is killing random drivers at night on the freeway, and it falls on one underdog loner of a cop to figure out who the killer is, why he’s doing it, and take the motherfucker down!
Well, there is a cop protagonist, but he’s no Popeye Doyle. The female protag is a nice ER nurse, and there’s a few other nice-enough people, but mostly this ensemble cast of ‘typical’ Angelenos is guaranteed to make your skin crawl. Some play a part in the mystery, others are just there, but it’s the kind of novel where the killer strikes again, and you think, “Well, no great loss to humanity.”
Getting back to those cops: when Highway Patrolman Binder has ‘a strong feeling’ he can nail the killer, you assume his tenacity will ultimately result in a climatic chase, only these cops might be the least-tenacious in crime fiction history. None of them do any actual detective work, even after the killer starts taunting them with Zodiac-style tape recordings packed with clues.
Nope, Deanne Barkley's cops, medical personnel, and average joes are all equally helpless here. They muddle through their days; the killings just one more weight pressing on their shoulders, which makes this a social portrait of L.A. closer to PLAY IT AS IS LAYS or DAY OF THE LOCUST than anything by Chandler or Ellroy. Jordan West compares it to Altman’s NASHVILLE, but it’s more akin to the maestro’s SHORT CUTS, including a seething pool cleaner who perhaps inspired the one Chris Penn played.
What kind of misanthrope would write a book like this? I Googled Ms. Barkley, and no, she enjoyed a pretty swell Hollywood career as an exec and producer. Prominent people lauded her as thoughtful and personable when she passed in 2013; nothing in her obit suggests whatever darkness she plumbed to write her only published novel.
Now that it’s over, I don’t imagine I’ll dwell on FREEWAY, but it may well come roaring back to me some sleepless night, like the echoes of those ominous midnight racers.
Later that year, the late-night car club rallies started; lines of fifteen to twenty cars snaking past, then returning twenty minutes later going the opposite way. At no time were any of these curfew-breakers chased by the cops. I never heard a siren, or saw a chopper. The road warriors owned the night, and I did wonder about them. Did they follow a route, or was it the thrill of the open range? Could be a short story there! Like Bradbury’s “The Foghorn,” only instead of the mournful call of the lighthouse, it was the distant, persistent whine of a high-performance engine luring the unwary to their doom. I tried a few plots, but eventually gave up. Any attempt to explain the haunting roar made it banal. It was a vibe, not a story. A future urban myth.
My buddies Mike and Jordan both note in their reviews that FREEWAY is more contemplative than the pulp cover and story blurb suggest, but I was still expecting a fairly standard seventies thriller. Someone is killing random drivers at night on the freeway, and it falls on one underdog loner of a cop to figure out who the killer is, why he’s doing it, and take the motherfucker down!
Well, there is a cop protagonist, but he’s no Popeye Doyle. The female protag is a nice ER nurse, and there’s a few other nice-enough people, but mostly this ensemble cast of ‘typical’ Angelenos is guaranteed to make your skin crawl. Some play a part in the mystery, others are just there, but it’s the kind of novel where the killer strikes again, and you think, “Well, no great loss to humanity.”
Getting back to those cops: when Highway Patrolman Binder has ‘a strong feeling’ he can nail the killer, you assume his tenacity will ultimately result in a climatic chase, only these cops might be the least-tenacious in crime fiction history. None of them do any actual detective work, even after the killer starts taunting them with Zodiac-style tape recordings packed with clues.
Nope, Deanne Barkley's cops, medical personnel, and average joes are all equally helpless here. They muddle through their days; the killings just one more weight pressing on their shoulders, which makes this a social portrait of L.A. closer to PLAY IT AS IS LAYS or DAY OF THE LOCUST than anything by Chandler or Ellroy. Jordan West compares it to Altman’s NASHVILLE, but it’s more akin to the maestro’s SHORT CUTS, including a seething pool cleaner who perhaps inspired the one Chris Penn played.
What kind of misanthrope would write a book like this? I Googled Ms. Barkley, and no, she enjoyed a pretty swell Hollywood career as an exec and producer. Prominent people lauded her as thoughtful and personable when she passed in 2013; nothing in her obit suggests whatever darkness she plumbed to write her only published novel.
Now that it’s over, I don’t imagine I’ll dwell on FREEWAY, but it may well come roaring back to me some sleepless night, like the echoes of those ominous midnight racers.
July 12, 2026
People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles. Is this what Bret Easton Ellis was talking about? The cover image had me expecting the novel version of Point Blank or Bullitt, but this actually felt more like one of Atom Egoyan's quiet, panoramic 90s movies- lonely people in a big city drawn together by chance or fate, in this case by the specter of a freeway sniper who drives a dark-blue Maverick, pulls up alongside his victims with the same move every night (left hand turning off the headlights, right hand reaching for the gun in the passenger seat), and then vanishes down the nearest off-ramp before anyone can catch him. I'm tempted to call this a snapshot of LA in the late 70s, but it's a strange one- going for neither granular realism on one hand, nor out-and-out surrealism on the other. It channels more the ambient hum of the nighttime hours: the people in ER waiting rooms, the TVs left on in quiet bedrooms, the Top 40 DJ on the radio, and a vision of the freeway as a lawless, dreamlike annex to the city proper, a place where two strangers might find romance as easily as sudden, shattering violence. Characters who work the night shift are almost always interesting; and the widowed night-nurse Sunny, who leaves her front door unlocked every night and starts an affair with a man who may or may not be the sniper, was quite a memorable one. Very cool novel, overall.
April 14, 2026
3.5; pulp Altman - Nashville reimagined as a west coast grindhouse take on Little Murders, with an LA haunted by a mystery shooter randomly drive by-ing people on the freeway refracted thru a handful of disparate citizens whose lives are impacted (and increasingly connected) by the ongoing rampage. Both of its time and strongly transitional, very much a reflection of the early 70s malaise era with alienation, helplessness, and ceaseless grinding fear the order of the day, while the portrayal of latchkey kids skateboarding aimlessly across the city in desperate search of guidance or meaning feels like a dress rehearsal for the likes of River's Edge and Penelope Spheeris, not to mention prefiguring pretty perfectly the dawning of the era when the idealism and hopeful potential of the prior decade was replaced by coping/self-medication/distraction, and constant casual atrocity (gun based or otherwise), was definitively revealed to be a feature instead of a bug in our society. Other highlights include the death of a pick-up artist/would-be stalker so skin-crawlingly misogynistic his murder comes as a ray of comparative sunshine and an adulterous, heroin-addicted musician doing the 'stuck in Ojai' shuffle revealed to be one of most grounded characters in the novel.
Read
January 9, 2019Deanne Barkley did a very good job with this one. she combined the books scene of an industrial city with modern language all inevitably meeting back to the same scene that was the soul of the book. that there was a highway sniper terrorizing the streets, killing many in his path on the busy road. the book started out focused around a couple and a lone man who inevitably met his end of the road with a bullet to the head. and like the couple, the city and people in it as a whole was just as confused as the other. leading the book through a path of modern and rather uncensored language and scenarios, adding to the crazy excitement and suspense that Deanne Barkley puts upon the reader.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews