Damned Right

by Bayard Johnson

Damned Right is a visceral new incarnation of the American road novel that blasts full-throttle toward enlightenment. Its twentysomething protagonist practices the yoga of speed and motion toward a peculiarly American nirvana at 200 mph. The freeways beyond a mountain community in the Pacific Northwest promise a non-Euclidean geometry of right and wrong, and without fully understanding his mission he is compelled to head south. The bleak sprawl of Los Angeles lies ahead of him, as it lies ahead of us all. In the city of tomorrow he meets a succession of fossilized idealists imprisoned by their dreams. They draw him into a series of adventures and ordeals that reveal an apocalyptic vision of the future.

Genres: Fiction

168 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

Reviews

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Speed, freedom, and mobility, the hallucinatory (illusory?) essence and promise of the American landscape and freeway system, conveyed in a 200mph rush of a road novel. This feels like a quintessential counterculture novel, but by conveying a kind of unrest that mostly found expression at the end of the 60s and into the 70s, while being written in the 90s, it seems to have missed its prime period. 20 years later, though, who cares? This is an essential speed-blasted assessment of societal decay and stagnation, spun out in a constant series of memorable images and set-pieces that race breathlessly by and are lost into the hazily-remembered distance. Traveling so fast, full attention must be held in the present moment, in keeping tires to the road and other traffic out of the path -- memory is shuttered and the future impossible to anticipate. But is this the ideal or the downfall? Both?

This was released by Fiction Collective 2's Black Ice imprint of the mid-90s, designed to introduce a new generation of radical authors to the world, and something that I so need to explore more of.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

A man speeds toward L.A. in a handcrafted alcohol-fueled car on a two-fold mission: to find his twin sons and to spread the gospel of driving fast. The book is so imbued with speed that the pages turn themselves. It's a road novel in the purest sense, singular in its dedication to clean and efficient forward motion. When the narrator arrives in L.A. he begins to lose his way, frustrated by the constant gridlock. He hates distractions but they're creeping in on all sides. He encounters an array of bizarre characters, including a man who drapes himself in kelp and wears a look that says he's not sure, but thinks maybe he's doing it right? Like all good Americans, the narrator keeps moving forward, even his car lacks reverse gear. He moves from scene to scene with an adroit casualness. He eschews alcohol, drugs, street signs, and stoplights. He keeps honing in on his goals, paring away at these distractions with the help of his new sculptress friend. He came to the vortex on a mission: he needs to wake the Walking Dead and show them how it's done. But first he has to find the twins...

[Published in 1994 by Black Ice Books, an imprint of Fiction Collective Two, with a mission to 'introduce readers to the new generation of dissident writers in revolt'.]

[Angelina Feronti · Rating 4 out of 5]

A man has a mission to drive down from the PNW to LA to meet his children and find a freeway to go 200mph on in his self-made scrap car that runs on alcohol as fuel. It's a bizarre journey of encounters with strangers and a short read about speed and motion that gets you lost in the whirlwind of its apocalyptic vision of LA.

Picked up at Space Cowboy in Joshua Tree.

[Colleen · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars. It's a very long short story with the theme song 'Need for Speed'. I thought the section on reaching LA would follow the 5 theories: repelled like two magnets north poles, slingshot off the gravity field like a rocket ship arcing a tangent around a big planet, spattered against some skyscraper, sucked in like in a black hole, or nothing happening. I thought the kelp man would lead to some Bukowski characters. But Johnson isn't a natural story teller. He tells stories but you've already heard them. The back cover quotes Leary. I was at a party in the late '60 where Guru Leary was explaining how speed was so much better than heroin. My friends and I just looked at each other. What about all those incredibly good jazz musicians who took heroin all their long lives? I kept searching for a metaphor for this ode to speed story and decided it had to be the northern South American culture that used weaving to record their stories. When you looked at the village fields you saw yet another weaving if your eyes were tuned in. An American would wonder where the nearest 6 lane super highway was. Missing the slow food, the interconnected ecosystem, the anti-entropy of multitudes of life forms, the eccentric passions of the 'Walking Dead', and the inspiration for art.

[H.S. Palladino · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great, Authentic road novel