In "Fifty-Two Miles to Terror" by Alex Gaby (The Saturday Evening Post, Jan. 14, 1956, reprinted ten years later in 52 Miles to Terror and Other Stories of the Road), a man named Biff, driving on a lonely road in the American West, is tormented by the unseen driver of a red hotrod. The driver of the hotrod is anonymous. The threat seems embodied in the vehicle itself. In Gaby's story, the man is not alone. He has his wife and his daughter in the car with him. The driver of the hotrod is also not alone. His passenger is as unspeaking and anonymous as he is. Both drive unnamed cars. We can assume the first is a conservative, family-type car, although it does okay in a drag race. Maybe the second is a souped-up Ford. Anyway, all of that reminds me of the story "Duel" by teller of weird tales Richard Matheson, which was published in Playboy in April 1971 and adapted to film later that year by Steven Spielberg from Matheson's script. We watched Duel on television when we were kids. Only much later did I read the story.
In the film version of Duel, the driver of the truck is anonymous, unspeaking, faceless, and almost unseen. The truck seems to be disembodied and to act on its own. It seems itself to be the menace and the threat, or maybe the driver is simply an extension of the truck. When we watched Duel, I had a sense that the truck and driver were together a supernatural force. I don't think there's anything in the movie to dispel that sense. But then in any encounter with an inexplicable evil, we are perhaps also in an encounter with the supernatural.
In Duel the movie, the protagonist, named, significantly, Mann, drives a red, late-model Plymouth Valiant. (The model name sounds like the epithet of a knight, a hero. Look for a Plymouth Valiant in the story behind "Vehicle" by the Ides of March, from 1970.) The truck is a 1957 Peterbilt 281. The vehicles, especially the truck, become almost like characters. In "Duel" the story, neither vehicle is identified. It might have been a better story if they had been. It might have helped us visualize the duel or joust that takes place. In film, cars and trucks can't be generic. They have to be identifiable products. In prose, you can write "car" and "truck" and that can work, at least as a bare minimum.
"Duel" the story seems to me overwrought, somewhat repetitive, probably padded for length. The atmosphere of menace and suspense seems partly artificial to me. The writing style is pulpish. As I remember it, Duel the movie is more streamlined and economical. There are of course no thoughts and not much dialogue. (There are long periods of silence in No Country for Old Men [2007], too.) Prose can be inward, whereas film is mostly outward. Beyond that, Duel was made by a 23-year-old director who grew up on movies rather than reading prose. And it is very suspenseful.
In "Duel," there is a wreck at the end, but the driver Mann seems somewhat passive. The wreck is partly by accident. In Duel, there is also a wreck at the end, but Mann, played by Dennis Weaver, brings that about. He is the agent of his own salvation. In that way, he's like Biff in "Fifty-Two Miles to Terror." Both men are triumphant in the end, for they have vanquished their tormenters. Both are the heroes and the protagonists of their own stories. The drivers of the other vehicles--or the vehicles themselves--are the obvious antagonists. In Duel the movie, though, the situation is more extreme, the threat and menace more dire, the antagonist actually evil as far as we can tell, partly because his motivation remains unknown and unexplained. Duel might count as a weird tale. It might also be a conte cruel except that it ends in relief and release.
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Richard Matheson based his story on an experience he had while driving with his friend Jerry Sohl on a California road. The date was November 22, 1963. John F. Kennedy was assassinated on that day in Dallas. He was our only president killed while riding in an automobile, a Lincoln Continental, named for our first president to die by violence. C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley also died that day. Their deaths were of course overshadowed by the assassination of the American president.
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The last of the four car stories in this series is The Hitcher, released in 1986. In that movie, C. Thomas Howell's character, named Jim Halsey, is driving a red Cadillac Seville across West Texas when he runs into the title character, a man named John Ryder, played by Rutger Hauer. An hour or more of suspense and terrible menace, evil, violence, and gore follows. The writer of the original story, Eric Red, was inspired by the song "Riders on the Storm" by the Doors and its lyric "there's a killer on the road." The character name "John Ryder" lets us know that that's what he does--he rides. By the way, Eric Red also wrecked his car. A strange story.
As in the three previous stories I have written about in this series, The Hitcher takes place on the road, in the American West, when one driver encounters another.* In "The Last Bonneville," the first driver is not the protagonist. He in fact falls victim to the second. In the other three, the first driver is the protagonist, and he has a clear antagonist. I don't know that Richard Matheson ever read "Fifty-Two Miles to Terror." He didn't have to. He had personal experience from which to draw in writing his story. Film critic Gene Siskel may have detected a subsequent influence when he wrote that The Hitcher is "a thinly veiled but more gruesome ripoff of Steven Spielberg's 'Duel.'" I can't say one way or another. But there are similarities among these three stories, written before the twentieth century came to an end. "The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson is significantly different. It's a story of the twenty-first in which there aren't any heroes and evil drives through the world, seemingly unimpeded, with the top down and the driver whooping it up as he puts the miles and leaves the bodies in a trail behind him.
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*I have written that "Fifty-Two Miles to Terror" takes place in the West. It's actually on the approach to Waco, which is in central Texas. We just don't know in which direction the driver is going. In any case, if you drive across Texas from east to west, you will begin in places that are almost indistinguishable from the East and make your way into places that are very clearly in the West. Just where is the transition? Somewhere in central Texas, I guess, where it turns from green to brown.
Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley
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