Throttle by Joe HillMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I probably bought this back when it was released, or a couple of years after. As with many book on my ereader, I tend to buy them and then promptly forget about them, unlike my shelves of unread paperbacks, which stare at me silenting telling me to read them. And at the end of the year, I decided to have a look through to find some short tales and I spotted this one.
Written by Joe Hill and his father Stephen King in dedication to Richard Matheson, the director of many films, including Duel, which this is a sort of homage to. I know the film Duel, having seen it at some point in my teens, and so I understood that something was going to happen with the truck, when it appeared, but it was still pretty shocking.
There were a lot of characters, but they were handled well as we started to understand the story through dialogue and interaction. A group of bikers have been scammed out of a lot of money, and when confronting the perpetrator, things went array and a murder took place. They are on their way to Vegas, debating whether to confront a connected person to try and get their money back, when a trucker overhears them - at least that's what they believe, we never really know. What follows is grim, and tense and there are few survivors.
I really enjoyed this, it's definitely in the King wheelhouse. Worth a read.
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