“Eric Red’s WHITE KNUCKLE is as high octane a horror thriller as they come. It is a cross between SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and Richard Matheson’s DUEL.” -The Novel Pursuit.
Monday, May 25th, 2015
“Terror and suspense on the road.
Eric Red’s White Knuckle is as high octane a horror thriller as they come. It is a cross between Silence of the Lambs and Richard Matheson’s Duel. It also bears a very slight resemblance to the 80s film, The Hitcher which was written by Eric Red as well as was one of my favorite vampire movies, Near Dark. Those two movies and this novel have something in common and that is they show that Red knows how to write dark and evil characters that jump out at you. If his psycho villains come out a little too super-human sometimes, it just revs up the suspense and gives us a little more worry and need to cheer on the hero or, in this case, the heroine.
Our heroine is FBI agent Sharon Ormsby who is assigned to the FBI’s Highway Serial Killing Initiative which tracks and hunts down murders on interstate highways. She comes across a pair of bodies that appear to be linked but, if so, it means that the killer has been active for over 30 years. In the meantime through alternating scenes, the reader discovers quickly that this is a trucker who uses the CB handle White Knuckle. He is abducting women and imprisoning them in his own torture chamber on wheels.
White Knuckle has the right amount of action, crime know-how, suspense, and terror to appeal to a number of genre readers. The FBI/CSI enthusiasts will get a lot of crime-fighter stuff. The author certainly know a lot about the trucking industry too. The suspense/thriller reader will not be disappointed with the tense writing and many taut action scenes. And the horror fans will find lots of scares, both psychological and physical. But it is the cat-and–mouse relationship between Sharon and White Knuckle that kept my interest. The character of White Knuckle is a larger than life serial killer; obsessed, thinks he is smarter than everyone else and just may be, and highly misogynistic. His killing of women is described by the author in a way that hides no facts about his villainy and frankly may be too much for some readers. Yet when Sharon, who is undercover and on the road with a veteran truck driver she had partnered up with, comes into contact with him we can feel the killer being both threatened and challenged by this woman. This is handled well by the author and only adds to the tension as Sharon builds her case and White Knuckle prepares for what he sees to be his final triumph. The final climatic scene is one of the best written action segments I have ever read on paper.” Rating: 5 out of 5 stars –Martin Vernon, The Novel Pursuit.
Read the entire review at http://bit.ly/1ApAda9.
