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Drive-Thru
BAD BUSINESS THIS IS.
Looking out the windshield, I took note of the drive-thru and the restaurant it was attached to, the design of which looked more like a Third World gulag than a family restaurant. Its sharp edges and flat, featureless gray exterior were reminiscent of a death camp, while its smoking rooftop suggested a waste-to-energy facility's smokestack. Beside the entrance door, a small island was filled in with red cedar chips and a single stunted tree was planted there, flaccid in its wilting atrophy.
“We're not moving,” Chantal said with her eyes closed.
A hack writer, a reluctant heroin dealer, a snotty rich kid, a wanna-be gangsta, and two very dissatisfied women. What do they all have in common? More than they would like to admit.
After a trip to a drive-thru fails to produce their desired fast-food items, five relative strangers find themselves trapped inside an empty quick-serve restaurant with a racist robot and a thoroughly despicable narrator.
As paranoia sets in and tensions escalate, the group employs stereotypes and superstitions in their effort to make sense of their mysterious circumstance. What follows is a cruel satire challenging everything we think we know about addiction, freedom, casual dining, consumerism, and cannibalism.
Praise for Bob Freville
“Howlingly funny...deeply unsettling...It seems no stone goes unturned in Freville’s examination of that subset of American...that feels oppressed on all sides at all times.” - McEric, Ain’t It Cool News
“America’s next great literary voice.” - Josh Darling, author of 9 Horror Stories: The Sequel
“Hilarious and depressing, irreverent and poignant.” - Nikolas P. Robinson, author of May Cause Unexplained Ocular Bleeding
“...one of the funniest...of the year... manages to make a number of important points...” - Compulsive Reader
“Freville gives us the kind of corybantic ripostes to which Martin McDonagh has long aspired...succeeds at discussing difficult subject matter in a new and accessible way.” - Inkwell
Looking out the windshield, I took note of the drive-thru and the restaurant it was attached to, the design of which looked more like a Third World gulag than a family restaurant. Its sharp edges and flat, featureless gray exterior were reminiscent of a death camp, while its smoking rooftop suggested a waste-to-energy facility's smokestack. Beside the entrance door, a small island was filled in with red cedar chips and a single stunted tree was planted there, flaccid in its wilting atrophy.
“We're not moving,” Chantal said with her eyes closed.
A hack writer, a reluctant heroin dealer, a snotty rich kid, a wanna-be gangsta, and two very dissatisfied women. What do they all have in common? More than they would like to admit.
After a trip to a drive-thru fails to produce their desired fast-food items, five relative strangers find themselves trapped inside an empty quick-serve restaurant with a racist robot and a thoroughly despicable narrator.
As paranoia sets in and tensions escalate, the group employs stereotypes and superstitions in their effort to make sense of their mysterious circumstance. What follows is a cruel satire challenging everything we think we know about addiction, freedom, casual dining, consumerism, and cannibalism.
Praise for Bob Freville
“Howlingly funny...deeply unsettling...It seems no stone goes unturned in Freville’s examination of that subset of American...that feels oppressed on all sides at all times.” - McEric, Ain’t It Cool News
“America’s next great literary voice.” - Josh Darling, author of 9 Horror Stories: The Sequel
“Hilarious and depressing, irreverent and poignant.” - Nikolas P. Robinson, author of May Cause Unexplained Ocular Bleeding
“...one of the funniest...of the year... manages to make a number of important points...” - Compulsive Reader
“Freville gives us the kind of corybantic ripostes to which Martin McDonagh has long aspired...succeeds at discussing difficult subject matter in a new and accessible way.” - Inkwell
251 pages, Kindle Edition
Published December 1, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 16, 2022
Drive-Thru punches you in the gut, just like the filthy grab food on the menu. With the narrator’s truthful vulgarity and laughable caustic points, the strangers locked inside an empty restaurant verbally and physically battle out there differences. This hilarious satire is like a Quentin Tarantino script directed by Kevin Smith spanking us with an unsettling sense of despicable nature.
December 26, 2022
Full Review
Drive-Thru is a funny and entertaining dark satire of modern America. Freville does horrible things to horrible people, but still makes you feel for them in the end. Instead of going through the McDonald’s drive-thru, make dinner at home and read this novel instead.
Drive-Thru is a funny and entertaining dark satire of modern America. Freville does horrible things to horrible people, but still makes you feel for them in the end. Instead of going through the McDonald’s drive-thru, make dinner at home and read this novel instead.
December 9, 2022
A group of people descend on a drive thru in anytown USA, and the drive thru descends on them. Somehow the drive thru seals them away from the world, a world they bring with them in many dysfunctional ways. This baggage is the type spawned by profiteering algorithmicly charged system overload, where assumed polarisation is in reality wildly optimistic, a ruse for desensitised stimulation exhaustion.
Freville introduces a central figure too blasé about narrative to be unreliable, but one thing he is reliably is a dick. Thankfully that is not all he is, or spending a book-worth’s amount of time with him would be insufferable.
As the superficially disparate group try to ascertain what is going on, their collective frustrations and resentments snowball, trapped in the physical embodiment of what they all intuit to be wrong with contemporary monoculture, made mono by its infinite fractures, yet reduced to an elaborate set piece for data mining.
The premise reminds me of a classic limited location disaster film, where characters from different socio-economic backgrounds are thrown together in order to put the zeitgeist under a microscope. Where the confined space leads to quickly frayed tempers and people who would not normally meet are forced to face their own biases and prejudices. However, Freville offers a bleaker outcome for his characters, where so much of the public square is defined by the chaotic void slinging of opinion cultivated by social media that there is little hope of even a basic level of understanding, just blind projection of ill thought out pseudo knowledge.
A fitting examination of a nation facing the end of empire, a people driven psychotic by technologically induced breakdown, and, ill-equipped to respond, succumbing to heartbreak and tantrums.
Freville introduces a central figure too blasé about narrative to be unreliable, but one thing he is reliably is a dick. Thankfully that is not all he is, or spending a book-worth’s amount of time with him would be insufferable.
As the superficially disparate group try to ascertain what is going on, their collective frustrations and resentments snowball, trapped in the physical embodiment of what they all intuit to be wrong with contemporary monoculture, made mono by its infinite fractures, yet reduced to an elaborate set piece for data mining.
The premise reminds me of a classic limited location disaster film, where characters from different socio-economic backgrounds are thrown together in order to put the zeitgeist under a microscope. Where the confined space leads to quickly frayed tempers and people who would not normally meet are forced to face their own biases and prejudices. However, Freville offers a bleaker outcome for his characters, where so much of the public square is defined by the chaotic void slinging of opinion cultivated by social media that there is little hope of even a basic level of understanding, just blind projection of ill thought out pseudo knowledge.
A fitting examination of a nation facing the end of empire, a people driven psychotic by technologically induced breakdown, and, ill-equipped to respond, succumbing to heartbreak and tantrums.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews