The Road To Jewel Beach

A spare, short novel. Emotionally terse, sharply observed. This is post-Vietnam on the west coast where the travelling is still easy and being on the road is still good, but now it’s not a matter of listening to bop on the radio and smoking joyful joints à la Kerouac. It’s moving drugs by Greyhound bus across the border for the mob. It’s staving off panic attacks at the first sign of intimacy. It’s sex without emotion, and hallucinatory hospitals, broken-down vets, and the murder of your own mother as a merciful release into the little of untouched nature that is left.

Christopher Adamson has also published in Exile: The Literary Quarterly, and his story “A Hot Day in Paris” was the recipient of the 2006 Carter V. Cooper Memorial Prize for Short Fiction (appeared in Ontario in Review, 2007).