What do you think?
Rate this book
Roadkill
NEXT GENERATION INDIE BOOK AWARDS FINALIST! Trapped inside our next world. An impassable freeway. No future. No past. One slim hope. Two unlikely allies: Mary, The Golden Woman--professor, mistress to the brass, historian--and Keats, a broken and doomed bonded worker with nothing left to lose.
A fateful night of escape that steers them into the private museum preserve of The Company that rules the world. Is the museum a trap? Is the freeway at the other end of the preserve as impassable as it is back in the bonded workers' camp? Will Mary and Keats find freedom or die under the rodancer wheels on the Liberty Freeway? An extraordinary story of captivity, the resilience of love, and the irrepressible human need for freedom.
A novel of imagination by award-winning author Barry Grills, Roadkill is a dystopic novel set in the future. Written about the triumph of the human spirit, about defying incredible odds, and the blooming of love across barriers of culture, economics and traditional experience, the novel is one part social commentary and one part futuristic adventure story.
Mary, a history professor at “The Company” university, wishes to escape the stifling autocratic regime in which she lives and works. A Bonded worker named Keats, under the influence of a sense-expanding drug called existentialene, flees the work camp where he lives, into a mysterious region at the edge of his city, known as The Open Space.
Encountering one another unexpectedly in this mysterious and uncharted setting, Mary and Keats—pursued by The Company’s security forces, known as Calvins—form an uneasy alliance as they flee deeper into what they soon discover is a large museum of fabricated eco-regions.
Roadkill is a chilling speculation about a world in the not-too-distant future where religion, history and all aspects of human life are manipulated by The Company: a sprawling corporate empire of interconnected factory branches and work camps.
A fateful night of escape that steers them into the private museum preserve of The Company that rules the world. Is the museum a trap? Is the freeway at the other end of the preserve as impassable as it is back in the bonded workers' camp? Will Mary and Keats find freedom or die under the rodancer wheels on the Liberty Freeway? An extraordinary story of captivity, the resilience of love, and the irrepressible human need for freedom.
A novel of imagination by award-winning author Barry Grills, Roadkill is a dystopic novel set in the future. Written about the triumph of the human spirit, about defying incredible odds, and the blooming of love across barriers of culture, economics and traditional experience, the novel is one part social commentary and one part futuristic adventure story.
Mary, a history professor at “The Company” university, wishes to escape the stifling autocratic regime in which she lives and works. A Bonded worker named Keats, under the influence of a sense-expanding drug called existentialene, flees the work camp where he lives, into a mysterious region at the edge of his city, known as The Open Space.
Encountering one another unexpectedly in this mysterious and uncharted setting, Mary and Keats—pursued by The Company’s security forces, known as Calvins—form an uneasy alliance as they flee deeper into what they soon discover is a large museum of fabricated eco-regions.
Roadkill is a chilling speculation about a world in the not-too-distant future where religion, history and all aspects of human life are manipulated by The Company: a sprawling corporate empire of interconnected factory branches and work camps.
299 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2017
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 25, 2018
If you've every wondered about your place in society or felt trapped by work, this book is the right escape for you. 'Roadkill' by Barry Grills is a dystopian, gritty-yet-poetic adventure story. There's also a sub-story that challenges traditional gender roles. (Spoiler: the female character takes the decisive lead, while the man struggles to overcome the pain of love lost.)
Barry Grills; https://www.amazon.ca/Roadkill-Barry-...
That man is Keats, a poor, scrawny 'bonded worker' who has been working in an assembly line since he was 10 years old, filling jars with the drug of choice of the day--a gel called 'existentialene.' He and the other bonded workers live a sparse and unrewarding life, sleeping in smoky tents at the edges of the city, near the freeway oval where 'rodancers' (fast-moving racecars with cow-catchers on the front) speed along the highway, with the goal of killing anyone who dares to try to leave the city or bonded camps.
The only thing keeping the lives of bonded workers from being utterly desperate is the rich mythology they get fed by The Company, including the imposed condition that the bonded workers do not speak; not with their voices, anyway, just with sign language.
This enforced silence of the bonded is one of the details that is embedded in the book without being explained explicitly. In the same way, the women in the story--specifically Mary, the heroine--have shortened work weeks and lots of freedom, including sexual freedom, and yet all the positions of power are held by men. The city workers live in the kind of polarized society many of us fear could return. The author has created a world where the gender divide has solidified and deepened at the hands of The Company. The author doesn't spell these forces out to you; instead he trusts the reader to make sense of this strangely simplified world.
Keats is wonderful as a naive waif placing his faith in The Company and 'Godallah,' and when his hopes for love are dashed, you feel his pain. Mary, for her own reasons, feels as trapped as Keats is, and by chance they end up colliding in the hidden space beyond both the city and the bonded camps.
This book is full of romance, but in an unrefined, less-than-pretty way. It's an adventure story where two mismatched people brave the unknown together, in unconventional role reversal.
If you like Ray Bradbury or H.G. Wells, you'll enjoy 'Roadkill'. It's a book about and for men who feel, and one that might surprise women who have ever wondered if men are capable of feeling at all. It's a slow, meandering walk through the deep tangled jungle of human emotion and ambition. It's about the human need for freedom, the costs of economic power and oppression, love and pain, human strength, friendship, and even destiny. Barry Grills has a gritty, poetic voice and a fixation with emotional nuance. A solid read that is at once sci-fi and literary.
Barry Grills; https://www.amazon.ca/Roadkill-Barry-...That man is Keats, a poor, scrawny 'bonded worker' who has been working in an assembly line since he was 10 years old, filling jars with the drug of choice of the day--a gel called 'existentialene.' He and the other bonded workers live a sparse and unrewarding life, sleeping in smoky tents at the edges of the city, near the freeway oval where 'rodancers' (fast-moving racecars with cow-catchers on the front) speed along the highway, with the goal of killing anyone who dares to try to leave the city or bonded camps.
The only thing keeping the lives of bonded workers from being utterly desperate is the rich mythology they get fed by The Company, including the imposed condition that the bonded workers do not speak; not with their voices, anyway, just with sign language.
This enforced silence of the bonded is one of the details that is embedded in the book without being explained explicitly. In the same way, the women in the story--specifically Mary, the heroine--have shortened work weeks and lots of freedom, including sexual freedom, and yet all the positions of power are held by men. The city workers live in the kind of polarized society many of us fear could return. The author has created a world where the gender divide has solidified and deepened at the hands of The Company. The author doesn't spell these forces out to you; instead he trusts the reader to make sense of this strangely simplified world.
Keats is wonderful as a naive waif placing his faith in The Company and 'Godallah,' and when his hopes for love are dashed, you feel his pain. Mary, for her own reasons, feels as trapped as Keats is, and by chance they end up colliding in the hidden space beyond both the city and the bonded camps.
This book is full of romance, but in an unrefined, less-than-pretty way. It's an adventure story where two mismatched people brave the unknown together, in unconventional role reversal.
If you like Ray Bradbury or H.G. Wells, you'll enjoy 'Roadkill'. It's a book about and for men who feel, and one that might surprise women who have ever wondered if men are capable of feeling at all. It's a slow, meandering walk through the deep tangled jungle of human emotion and ambition. It's about the human need for freedom, the costs of economic power and oppression, love and pain, human strength, friendship, and even destiny. Barry Grills has a gritty, poetic voice and a fixation with emotional nuance. A solid read that is at once sci-fi and literary.
January 28, 2025
A never-ending symphony of humanism.
What does our future look like? What might it look like? And what happens to those who “quest” for esoteric truths beyond the safety of their bounds, beyond the world assigned to them?
In his reality-based dystopian fiction, Roadkill, Barry Grills pens a vivid picture of just such a future, whereby the world’s prevailing problem—corporate greed––finds a new existence within a realm of human evolution that has gone past the need for emotionalism.
In Roadkill––a figurative title denoting the disposable nature of the unwanted––Grills creates a futurology where much of the meaning of existence has been forgotten, and yet somehow pieced back together into some facsimile of what it once might have been. But all of the pieces don’t quite fit together. Almost. But not quite. So what’s missing? The short answer: humanism, which has been deliberately bred out of the population, and one can only assume for greater profits and control by the powers-that-be, who themselves seem to be the bizarre end result of some past extreme of autocratic capitalism turned into brutal imperialism, and to the furthest extent where Homo sapiens have biologically splintered into two bad examples of themselves: the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots,’ or the extremely poor in bondage to the extremely rich. And although one language is shared by all, it is only the ‘haves’ who have retained their ability to speak it. The ‘have nots,’ having lost their power of voice a long time ago by the necessity of absolute silence, now resort to a primitive sign language known only to them. And, in contrast to both of these extremes, the deeply emotionalized literary prose used by the author seems to offset what cannot be logically vocalized by any of his characters, rich or poor. But like all great literature, Barry Grills’ tale, at its core, is a profound love story between two human beings from very different worlds, one a world of plenty and the other an existence of only unsatiated need, though with both protagonists finding themselves in a similar conflict with the one big-money power structure that reigns supreme over all of society.
Grills’ world building is highly imaginative and richly described, and there’s just enough adventure, suspense, romance, and action to keep the reader moving along quickly through the pages. More than just a masterful piece of dystopian storytelling, Roadkill seems to be a testament to times past, present, and most of all, times future, with an ending that left this reader with a small hope that there is still much to be discovered within the unexplored heights, breadth, and depths of the human experience. This was my first time reading this author, and I’m very much looking forward to exploring more of his many literary works. However, for now, I highly recommend Roadkill to all readers, regardless of their preferred genre. It’s definitely a five-star read.
What does our future look like? What might it look like? And what happens to those who “quest” for esoteric truths beyond the safety of their bounds, beyond the world assigned to them?
In his reality-based dystopian fiction, Roadkill, Barry Grills pens a vivid picture of just such a future, whereby the world’s prevailing problem—corporate greed––finds a new existence within a realm of human evolution that has gone past the need for emotionalism.
In Roadkill––a figurative title denoting the disposable nature of the unwanted––Grills creates a futurology where much of the meaning of existence has been forgotten, and yet somehow pieced back together into some facsimile of what it once might have been. But all of the pieces don’t quite fit together. Almost. But not quite. So what’s missing? The short answer: humanism, which has been deliberately bred out of the population, and one can only assume for greater profits and control by the powers-that-be, who themselves seem to be the bizarre end result of some past extreme of autocratic capitalism turned into brutal imperialism, and to the furthest extent where Homo sapiens have biologically splintered into two bad examples of themselves: the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots,’ or the extremely poor in bondage to the extremely rich. And although one language is shared by all, it is only the ‘haves’ who have retained their ability to speak it. The ‘have nots,’ having lost their power of voice a long time ago by the necessity of absolute silence, now resort to a primitive sign language known only to them. And, in contrast to both of these extremes, the deeply emotionalized literary prose used by the author seems to offset what cannot be logically vocalized by any of his characters, rich or poor. But like all great literature, Barry Grills’ tale, at its core, is a profound love story between two human beings from very different worlds, one a world of plenty and the other an existence of only unsatiated need, though with both protagonists finding themselves in a similar conflict with the one big-money power structure that reigns supreme over all of society.
Grills’ world building is highly imaginative and richly described, and there’s just enough adventure, suspense, romance, and action to keep the reader moving along quickly through the pages. More than just a masterful piece of dystopian storytelling, Roadkill seems to be a testament to times past, present, and most of all, times future, with an ending that left this reader with a small hope that there is still much to be discovered within the unexplored heights, breadth, and depths of the human experience. This was my first time reading this author, and I’m very much looking forward to exploring more of his many literary works. However, for now, I highly recommend Roadkill to all readers, regardless of their preferred genre. It’s definitely a five-star read.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews