A Goodwin Alum Publishes a Powerful Novel of Friendship, Danger, and Survival
A road trip! Four friends, a car, and a couple hundred miles of highway. What could be more fun? For Charlie, Jordan, Jam, and Jess, however, their carefree excursion quickly devolves into a nightmare. By the beginning of Chapter 2, the friends have been drugged and kidnapped by a gang of bloodthirsty hillbillies. So begins the intense, horrific, and extremely provocative new novel The Road Trip by Goodwin alum Channon M. Brown (AS in Nursing, 2013).
It turns out, however, that these hillbillies have picked the wrong road-trippers to mess with. All four of the friends have experience in law enforcement. Charlie is a motocross-racing SWAT team member. Jordan is a tattooed gun enthusiast. Jam and Jess are hell-raising martial arts masters. Oh, and they just happen to be women. Clearly, however, these ladies are not your typical damsels in distress, desperately waiting for a male hero to rescue them. The friends use their lethal expertise to turn the tables on their kidnappers and to unapologetically exact their own form of justice.
Brown says that she was inspired to write this book because, although she has always been a horror movie buff, she had “always been annoyed by female characters being victimized,” and she winced at generic representations of these characters “tripping through the woods” in their ineffective attempts to flee. The Road Trip is Brown’s attempt to tell a different kind of horror story, one that represents women as powerful characters who are able to use their expertise in forensics, self-defense, and weaponry to seize control of their own story.
By any standards, The Road Trip is a gripping story with a whirlwind pace, narrated with a pulse-pounding energy that makes it tempting to read through the entire book in a single sitting. For Brown, however, writing the book was about more than just telling a good story. She points out that, while horror films typically misrepresent female agency, they can remind us of the important truth that “women are being raped and brutalized in real life” every day. The Road Trip confronts the ugly social reality of violence against women, and it also challenges women to fight back against this reality by any means necessary. As Brown explains, “Why shouldn’t women stand up for themselves?”
The Road Trip is an exciting debut novel that brings together the dark imagination of Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight series, the technical detail of John Grisham’s thrillers, and the brutal, survivalist sensibility of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games books, and channels these qualities into a narrative of single-minded intensity. Readers who have a weak stomach – either for graphic violence or moral ambiguity – may want to sit this one out, but those who decide to tag along on Brown’s road trip will find that they are in for a memorable ride.
The Road Trip by C. M. Brown is available on Amazon.