Rating: 2 out of 5 men who’re mad as hell and they’re not gonna take it anymore

Buy Roadwork from Amazon here.

Buy Roadwork from Bookshop.org here.

Don’t get me wrong – it’s definitely worth a read. It’s just best tackled in chunks, like an emetophobic footballer.

Review (i.e. did I give six spoilers or only five? Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I’ve kinda lost track myself)

King’s Bachman offerings have developed a pretty solid theme by this point. It’s that we live in a society that shits on the little man, and Roadwork explores this the most of explicitly of the lot.

I said in my review of The Long Walk that King-as-Bachman dabbles in cod psychology, and this is amplified in Roadwork to the point where you could start calling him Dr. Fish. That isn’t to say that he doesn’t have a good point, most of the time, or a good understanding of human psychology, but that his psychological insights are a little too obvious, regular and shaky to settle comfortably into actual characterisation compared to his other books.

An example of this is that it’s a little unclear what the actual roadwork represents. Is it the government’s willingness to smash through the lives of the little people on a whim? Is it the arbitrary nature of life and death, the disaster that could occur blamelessly and evilly to any of us, like the cancer in his son’s brain? Is it the final point of no return, the degradation that strips a man of any need to follow the rules of society? It’s used as all of these, and more, and while it’s apt for all of them, it becomes too heavy a load for one little multi-lane highway extension to bear.

There are set-pieces throughout the book that are genuinely compelling. The opening scenes when he gets the guns; the conversations with Magliore; meeting Olivia; tripping on mescaline; the final explosive showdown. All of these are as gripping as high-friction gloves, and make the read well worth your while. It just takes a bit of effort to get to them, particularly when the connecting tissue is essentially the mental disintegration of a man.

I do really like the endings to Bachman books. A ‘downer’ ending can, in the wrong hands, feel a bit sophomoric, but here they match the tone and ambition of the novels perfectly. In some ways, the individual characters “win” as much as they can in a zero-sum game. This is true of Roadwork – his house and life are still ultimately destroyed as a result of the government’s decisions, but he at least takes the destruction into his own hands and delivers it as a fuck you rather than a capitulation. Does it have the same edge of immaturity as Killing In The Name? Yes. But it also tickles all the same anti-authoritarian nerve endings that feel innately right.