Order SAVAGE HIGHWAY here
(also reviewed)
Order APOSTLE RISING here - Read the Review
Order MR. GLAMOUR here - Read the Review
Order PIQUANT: TALES OF THE MUSTARD MAN here - Read the Review
Order ONE LOST SUMMER here - Read the Review
Order MEANINGFUL CONVERSATIONS here - Read the Review
Order NOIR CITY here - Read the Review
Order WRONG CROWD here - Read the Review
We live in the age of sexual politics. That means it's difficult for people to discuss the greatest motor of human desire without being accused of anything. What about sex hasn't been told already though, right? It beats me. You know who it doesn't beat? International novelist and man of mystery Richard Godwin, author of newly released novel Savage Highway. Godwin has never been the one to shy away from understanding the inner workings of desire in his novels and his new book, while not giving the question its most intricate treatment, might just be his boldest offering yet. Savage Highway is for savages, for people who have never been afraid of looking into the abyss.
Patty is drifting through Arizona when one day she hitches a ride with the wrong man. Red is a creepy trucker telling her horrifying stories about his past while trying to grope her at every opportunity. Shit eventually hits the fan with him and when forced to run for her life, she stumbles into a version of Arizona populated by power rapists and unfortunate women who happen to have been born there. Patty will have to fight her way out of there, through Red and his power rapist friends. Thank God, she has the help of outsider Johnny Sullivan, another damned soul and a journalist looking for a story to tell in the middle of nowhere, Arizona.
The very idea of writing a novel about a rape club would've gone awry 99,9% of the time. Not in Richard Godwin's able hands, though. Because this is what Savage Highway is about: a handful of brutal and soulless men in an isolated place using the law to shelter their organized abuse and murder of women. They're a rape club. It's an extremely disturbing idea and I would've laughed anyone who would've come up with that idea out of the room. Except Godwin. Richard Godwin writes the extreme and the disturbing very well. He's very good at writing obsession too and Savage Highway plays in his strengths. It's completely insane, but it's one of the rare thing you read in genre fiction that has a jagged edge.
Savage Highway is, first and foremost, a wayward hardboiled thriller about lawlessness. It's absolutely out of control and it trumps any genre conventions by redefining the idea of law. The lawmen of Savage Highway don't protect and serve. They domineer over an isolated region like feudal lords. It's a very pornographic novel by nature and the very raw language Richard Godwin used bugged me a little sometimes. Not that it was particularly shocking, but some images felt gratuitous. I could do without descriptions of bubbling sperm sticking to a characters legs, you know? Can't say it doesn't fit the program though. If anything, Savage Highway is an unapologetic bastard and I wouldn't like a Richard Godwin novel any other way.
The closest comparison I can give you to explain what reading Savage Highway actually feels like is an early, turn-of-the-century Takashi Miike in full provocateur mode directing the adaptation of a lost J.G Ballard manuscript. It's wild and fast paced and overflowing with violence, often of a sexual nature. It feels fresh and daring because there is no agenda behind it. Richard Godwin earnestly wanted to write a dark-as-shit story about sexual obsession and lawlessness and Savage Highway, while quite disturbing, is a successful novel. Richard Godwin is not for everybody and not all of his novels are a home run (he publishes too much for that), but he's one of the last writers you'll find with a jagged edge, meant to be read by the most adventurous only.