Life (and Death) On the Road: Stephen Graham Jones’ Interstate Love Song

In 2013, Nightscape Press released the book Three Miles Past, collecting three of Stephen Graham Jones’s original novella length works, Interstate Love Song, No Takebacks, and The Coming of Night. As I did for Stephen Volk’s Dark Master’s trilogy (Whitstable, Leytonstone, and Netherwood), I will be taking a gander at the three long fiction works as separate entities over the next few posts. First up: Interstate Love Song.

Long hours on the road grant added intensity to events and encounters that might be nothing more than blips in the background of the daytime. It also makes the world itself seem at least a little surreal. Back in 2013, I kicked off a year long stint of contract work in Houston, Texas. Trista and I were living in San Antonio at the time. I got an apartment in Houston and commuted on weekends back to SAtown, about four hours’ drive one way. On Friday, immediately after work, I’d get on the highway and go, leaving Houston in my rear view mirror as quickly as possible, and end up in San Antonio by about 8pm, just in time to grab pizza and a beer at our local bar, The Flying Saucer. Then, I’d enjoy the weekend, crash early on Sunday evening, wake up at 3 am Monday morning, get showered, dressed, eat breakfast, and out the door to make it the four hours back to get to work by starting time. Those early morning drives were the eeriest ones. They provided scenarios like the time I spied a big, black dog sitting in the middle of I-10, waiting patiently for someone to come along and smash it into the pavement. I managed to avoid that little tragedy, thank goodness, but that was one of many odd occurrences in those dark, predawn hours along that four-hour drive along the interstate. That gawdawful commute lasted from May 2013 through July 2014 (extended when contract work shifted to full time hire), at which point we moved the household and kitties to Houston.

A lot of that fourteen-month experience came flooding back to me while I was reading Interstate Love Song. Thankfully, I did not encounter the events found in that novella (which also takes place along I-10 between Texas and Florida, with a major stop off in Houston), but the mood of the thing, the weariness behind the words and the protagonist are things I can relate to. This grounded Jones’ novella even more intensely for me. The road is there, and it’s hella surreal in those hours before the sunshine creeps up over the horizon. Stephen Graham Jones gets this, and he writes about it with equally lucid and hallucinogenic prose.

At the heart of the novella is one dude, who has spent way, way, way too long on the road. William goes by a few names, particularly when he stops off at an animal shelter. As the novella opens, he’s waiting outside of one, working up his courage by drinking beers and stacking the cans on his dashboard. When he gets the will in place, he goes inside with claims of looking for his missing dog, an animal he cannot describe. In fact, we soon learn William has gone through a few of them by the time the novella opens. In fact, no sooner has he acquired a big, bad dog from that shelter than the timeline jumps ahead, using an intriguing metric: “Two dogs later—a Shepherd-mix and a Golden Retriever, each from the classifieds, families he’d had to make earnest, shuffling promises to—William pulled into a gas station, checked all his doors, and asked the clerk for the bathroom key.” (14)

These animals make find company for both William and his occasional road companions, even though they tend not to stick around too long, a few days at most. Maybe this next time will be different.

There’s something wrong with William’s hands. He tries to keep them in his pockets, knowing they will give away some vital clue about him if he should forget and leave them visible for the attendants. In fact, there’s something wrong with William, which maybe has to do with someone traveling these same routes who has been dubbed the I-10 Killer.

Interstate Love Song is an often-nightmarish accounting of William’s activities and meetings on the road, picking up dogs and occasional girls, as he travels the I-10 east. Stephen King has written no small number of road horror stories; so too, Gary A. Braunbeck and others. Here, Jones makes the territory his own with his fascinating, rambling sentences and his unflinching looks into creepy characters’ headspaces. Also, there is a surreal encounter (possibly a dream and possibly an actual supernatural event) involving a person with an animal head that manages to be just as eerie as the Elk Woman in the 2020 novel, The Only Good Indians.

Although this book came along relatively seven years ago (back then, he “only” had eleven novels and two other collections in the world), it clearly shows some of the passionate elements the author has infused into his more recent works. The animal headed person is not the only common element between this story and those that would follow it.

Stephen Graham Jones infuses his undying love of slasher stories intothe novella, as well. However, as he shows in both his experimental novel The Last Final Girl and a more recent novella like The Night of the Mannequins, his interest is not merely in the knife kill mode of slasher flicks. Interstate Love Song gives readers an uneasy glimpse into the workings of a killer’s mind. The fellow who has been dubbed the I-10 Killer is almost sympathetic despite the grueling work his hands perform. As we might find in novels like Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God, Gary A. Braunbeck’s Mr. Hands, or Jack Ketchum’s Stranglehold, Jones gives us a full on look at the human being lurking underneath the worker of these horrible deeds, and this makes the perpetrator all the more relatable, as much a victim as a victimizer. This pathos is generated organically, and makes the reading experience far more disturbing than, say, the glut of cheesy 1980s slasher crime paperbacks that employed lengthy, often unconvincing flashback chapters to childhood traumas as simplistic shorthand for what makes people kill. Here, we get enough detail to keep the killer from coming across as a void though not enough details to offer us any kind of easy footing.

Jones loves to write about dogs. They are here. Some rather nasty neighbor dogs play a key role in Mapping the Interior. Canines are, of course, central components to Mongrels. They play important roles in The Only Good Indians. In the author’s note to this story, Jones mentions “So this story, it’s about dogs, yeah. I think most of my stories are, really. Dog and trucks, and fathers, all in some narrative petri dish, just add antifreeze and radiation, let cook overnight.” (200) I might also add bikes and basketball to those ingredients, since they also find regular recurrence throughout his stories.

Interstate Love Song takes place across three numbered sections, each a little more surreal than the last. The finale is glorious nightmare fuel, surreal and just bent enough for us not to see it coming. The road getting there is unusual, surprisingly intimate, and well written. While the prose is not necessarily as polished as some of his more recent works, it is still effective. For a guy who claims, in one of the afterward bits, not to know “what a novella was or how it worked” (217) he sure does some interesting work at that length.

Interstate Love Song is an engaging, eerie read, made more so by prose that draws upon the weirdness of regular, long rides in the predawn hours. Hell, in 2013 I was driving this same stretch and could have passed William in the night. I might have stopped off to piss away a pint of Diet Coke at one of the rest areas where the I-10 Killer pulled off, as well. Eerie, man. Just plain eerie. That sums up this little gem of a story.

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Three Miles Past is available in eBook and paperback editions.

Next up, we will consider the second novella in the Three Miles Past collection, a glance into the innovative terrors found when a couple of guys invent an app to snap a picture of whatever might be just behind you when you get that eerie feeling of being followed. No Takebacks is another eerie yarn, more supernatural than human horror, and it is a compelling read.

WORKS CITED

Jones, Stephen Graham. Three Miles Past. Nightscape Press: 2013.

“Life (and Death) On the Road: Stephen Graham Jones’ Interstate Love Song” is copyright © 2020 by Daniel R. Robichaud. Cover image and quotes taken from the Nightscape Press paperback, released in 2013.

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