"The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson is a car and driving story that reaches its climax as a man crashes his car into an abutment along a desert highway. That man, named Felix De Groot, is not the hero or protagonist of this story. He is in fact the tormented. His tormenter lives on, unscathed, part of his mission accomplished. He drives away, next stop Nevada, to continue in his mission of spreading despair, death, and destruction.
I finished reading the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales in January 2024. Later that year I found a Scholastic book called 52 Miles to Terror and Other Stories of the Road, edited by Ruth Christopher Carlsen and G. Robert Carlsen, and published in 1966. The cover story is "Fifty-Two Miles to Terror" by Alex Gaby. It was originally in The Saturday Evening Post, in the issue of January 14, 1956. "Fifty-Two Miles to Terror" was adapted to film as Hot Rods to Hell, released in 1967, but by then the original concept might have become obsolete, for in the 1960s, teenagers were no longer villains, no longer the punks or duck-tailed greasers or juvenile delinquents of the 1950s. Instead, by 1967, young people were the main subjects and probably the main consumers of American popular culture. In reading "Fifty-Two Miles to Terror," I was reminded of "The Last Bonneville." These two stories, published nearly seventy years apart, have their parallels and their divergences. In a small way, they show how things have changed in our society and culture since the 1950s.
Like F. Paul Wilson's story, "Fifty-Two Miles to Terror" is about a driving and being on the road in the American West. Biff and Paula are on their way to see Aunt Mildred and her husband and family in Waco, Texas. In the back seat is their ten-year-old daughter Ruth. We don't know what kind of car they're driving. They call it "Steady Nellie," as if it were a horse, as if this were 1900 instead of midcentury. This is the 1950s, and they're a family. Their story is in The Saturday Evening Post, a popular, conservative, general-interest, slick magazine. On the other side of things are two teenagers in a bright red hotrod. They represent youth and new things, which might be cause for apprehension and fear.
Biff isn't exactly a hero--you'll have that if your name is Biff--but he is the protagonist in this story. The two unnamed teenagers in their unnamed red hotrod are the antagonists, the tormenters of Biff and his family. Biff is foolish in provoking them: he gets in a drag race with them in a small Texas town along the way. They win. He catches up and upbraids them at a last-chance gas station. After that, there are sixty miles of straight, empty road ahead of Biff and his passengers. Or it's empty until the red hotrod catches up. And then the torment and menace begin. Racing, dangerous road games, and games of chicken ensue. Finally, Biff tricks his tormenters with a complicated scheme that results in their wrecking their car against the concrete balustrade of a small bridge over a drainage ditch. When I read that, my mind went back to the story I had read ten months before.
Again, Biff isn't a hero exactly. He's too foolish and immature for that. And his tormenters aren't exactly villains. There's a "Hey, you kids, get off my lawn" quality to this story. Biff's tormenters are really just two teenaged boys, too immature to understand the seriousness of what they're doing. (Their mistake is in thinking that they're up against another teenaged driver and that he shares in their values and interests, that he wants to play their game. It doesn't help that Biff, tapping into his own immaturity, instigates the whole thing by taking them up on the invitation to drag race on a city street.) But Biff saves his family from a situation (that he helped create) and so maybe he is heroic after all. He is also cunning and competent. His scheme works. And in the end, out of charity, he offers to deliver the two anonymous teenagers--they go unnamed, in fact they don't even speak--to the nearest town.
In "The Last Bonneville," there isn't any Biff, for there isn't any hero and no one is saved from any menace. In "Fifty-Two Miles to Terror," there isn't really any villain in the end, just two teenaged boys trying to have what they call fun. At the climax of both stories, a car is wrecked against a concrete structure along the road. In "The Last Bonneville," it is the tormenter, not the tormented, who comes away unscathed. In "Fifty-Two Miles to Terror," it is the tormenters who are stopped. In Alex Gaby's story, there is a scheme. It works, and the menace is ended. Biff and his family drive on, and we can be sure of a happy ending. What a story they will have for Aunt Mildred and the gang in Waco. In F. Paul Wilson's story, there is also a scheme. It works, too, and the menace continues. Like Biff, Dwight Bonneville is cunning and competent. It's on to Nevada for him. Who will die there?*
In "Fifty-Two Miles to Terror," Biff's family car is something of a character. They call it--her--"Old Nellie." Even so, we know who Old Nellie's passengers are. They're the real characters in the story. The passengers of the red hotrod, however, are almost unseen. They are unspeaking and anonymous. The threat and the menace are almost disembodied from human characters and are instead embodied in the car itself. (Cars have bodies, too. And is the hotrod red because it is somehow diabolical?) In Gaby's story, the red hotrod becomes the character, the antagonist, the threat. What do the hot-rodders call their car? We don't know, but it seems almost certain to have a name. Finally, after the crash and after the torment is gone, Biff the hero, such as he is, has mastery over the hotrod and the two teenagers. The whole situation reminds me of a third car story . . .
Next: Duel
-----
*The movie No Country for Old Men (2007), another story of the road and the American West, ends with a car crash, too. The killer doesn't come away unscathed. Nonetheless, he comes away, and we can be sure that the killing will go on.
 |
| 52 Miles to Terror (1966), with cover art by Mort Künstler (1927-2025), one of the most aptly named artists ever. I can't tell what kind of car that is. Is it a Chevy? Could it be a Corvair? Anyway, there is only one story in this collection that might be considered a weird story, and no science fiction stories at all, even if the souped-up jeep in Bill Mauldin's story is a work of near super-technology. The almost weird-fictional story is "Hearse of the Speedway" by Peter Granger, originally in Esquire in September 1936. |
Text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley
No comments:
Post a Comment