Review: Cars and the extreme evil they're capable of
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 09 1, 2011
Driving in the family 2011 Ford Expedition, wife Carla riding shotgun and kids Rachel, 6, and Blake, 4, fidgeting in the back, Johnny Lussier flips his blinker and veers left onto the ramp to the abandoned Mile 81 rest area off I-95 near Portland, Maine.A pick-up pulling a horse trailer is parked in the breakdown lane. Traffic cones had been neatly placed behind the trailer and Johnny wondered if the driver needed help. Bad mistake. Really stupid. It would prove to be the "worst -and last--decision of his life."My own bad decision, not the last of my life for sure, was to download "Mile 81" on my Kindle and start reading at 7:50 Thursday morning when I should have been heading out the door to work. Bad mistake. Stupid, really. King's Kindle Short grabbed me by the collar and wouldn't let go until I got to the end. I pulled into work at 10:15.What is it about King's style that grabs and won't let go? The story he tells in "Mile 81," of cars and their passengers pulling into the abandoned rest stop 81 and confronting the dangers and peril lurking there, doesn't offer much in the way of plausibility. It's a mile or more from any sort of reality. But none of that seems to matter.Maybe it's the pacing. One car after another with pulls into the rest area. We get only enough information and back story to make the occupants real and worth caring about. Then wham, another victim gets slurped up.Maybe it the atmospherics. Particularly memorable is the sound that follows the mayhem, "a pouck sound like a tennis ball being smartly struck by a racquet." Or the continual "tick. . . tick . . . tick" made the emergency flasher of an abandoned Prius.Maybe it's the details. A wedding ring lying mysteriously beside the door of a rusted out, mud covered station wagon with no plates. A cell phone lying on the ground with a single drop of blood on the touch screen.Or perhaps it's the characters, many of whom as in many other King stories are kids. Smart-talking kids with innocence and intuitive intelligence who tend to be the survivors. King is particularly good at showing kids being kids and talking to each other the way kids do using words like "boogersnot," "numbo" and "Holy Jeezum."Whatever the reason, the fact seems to remain for all the holes and all the things improbable that fill King's stories generally and "Mile 81" in particular, there isn't anyone writing today with a better imagination and a better ability to pull you in and keep you turning pages until the very end. Even if it means showing up late for work.