All a plot summary could leave one with is a distorted view of a distorted story. But there are things about this book that can be told, the things that work to make this essential reading for literature, fringe fiction, magical realism, myth, and postmodernism fans. Jones manages to grab readers by the short hairs and drag them down the Fast Red Road with him. He uses symbol, metaphor, puns, irony, allusion, illusion, and the macabre with such force that reading this book is a dizzy, vertiginous experience. At times Jones wraps symbol, foreshadowing, and re-shadowing around the reader's eyes like a diaphanous black veil, wrapping tighter and tighter until the reader can no longer see for the blur.
Pop culture becomes both metaphor and reality, until they overlap and bleed into one another.
But all the while, Jones keeps meaning just out of reach, both for the readers and the characters, with whom the reader increasingly identifies even as things become more blurred and confused. This essential element, this chasing after meaning and resolution, is what keeps the red road fast. As I was reading this book, the edges of my own reality seemed to blur and my everyday world seemed to follow the contours of Pidgin's, where perception was increased and dramatically deceptive all at once. That is the true power of story at its best, to draw the reader into the world of the story just as the story inserts itself into the reader's world. Whether or not Jones actively pursued this end, he shows himself to be powerfully capable of engineering it.