About Driving Alone: A Love Story
- Paperback: 102 pages
- Publisher: Blank Slate Press (December 1, 2012)
Billy Keyhoe’s luck just ran out. After beating his girlfriend to a bloody pulp and being shot at by the clerk of the convenience store he was trying to rob, Billy takes off in his daddy’s beat-up ’66 Caddy leaving Waycross, GA and all his troubles in the rear-view mirror. At a crossroads, he picks up a beautiful hitchhiker, Feather, who seems to know more about him than he knows about himself. As they drive and the blistering heat of the summer sun bears down on him, Billy slowly realizes his life is being judged and that he has to face up to his past. The farther they go, the more Billy is drawn to Feather until he realizes he “had fallen in love somewhere out there in the night, with something or someone, or just an idea, it wasn’t clear.” Unfortunately for Billy, he discovers that even true love cannot save him, and he finally realizes he just might have gone too far to ever make it back.
Finished reading Driving Alone by Kevin Lynn Helmick. Driving Alone recasts the manic pixie dream girl as a noir, bruised angel of judgment wandering the back roads of the American South, waiting at the crossroads to be picked up by desperate drivers running from themselves. Highly recommended. You’ll want to grab this when it comes out. – Spinetingler Magazine
Driving Alone is a gorgeously grim new take on redemption and romance. It is unsettling and provocative; combining the classic romance of the open road with the claustrophobia of a morality play. If Hell is other people, Driving Alone has the Devil riding shotgun. – Jared Shurin, reviewer for Pornokitsch, director and literary judge for The Kitschies
Hardboiled, hardbitten and haunting as well as lyrically libidinous and lovingly lascivious, Kevin Lynn Helmick tackles sex and death along the lost highway the way the damned do—alone. – Jedidiah Ayres, author of A F*ckload of Shorts
An intense nightmare that shimmers with beauty and darkness. Helmick broils these characters in southern humidity and human tragedy until the reader is left sweating, breathless and amazed. – Fred Venturini, author of The Samaritan
A journey into darkness and painful self-discovery … a brilliantly lyrical and richly painted hybrid of noir and magic realism. Superb. – Paul D. Brazill- The Gumshoe, Guns Of Brixton, Drunk On The Moon
About Kevin Lynn Helmick
Kevin Lynn Helmick, born 1963, Fort Madison IA, is the author of The Lost Creek Journal, selective poems and flash fiction, Clovis Point, a rural noir thriller, Sebastian Cross, a literary adventure novel, Heartland Gothic, a literary black comedy, and Driving Alone, a dark southern gothic romance novella. Growing up seven years younger than the youngest of four brothers, his views of the world were largely shaped by 60’s and 70’s pop culture, by Elvis Presley, James Bond, Andy Warhol, comic books and of course the music of The Beatles, Bob Dylan and The Doors.
Kevin has had several short stories published including “Allison,” in Manarchy Magazine, “My Muse Plays Hard to Get” in Pulp Metal Magazine, and “No 7 Valentine” in Noir at the Bar II. All proceeds from Noir at the Bar II go to support independent bookseller Subterranean Books of St. Louis. All Kevin’s books and full bio are available at Amazon Books.
Kevin keeps a blog with other short stories, commentaries and guest writers at The Write Room Cafe.
Kevin Lynn Helmick TLC Book Tours TOUR STOPS:
Tuesday, January 29th: Seaside Book Nook
Wednesday, January 30th: Under My Apple Tree
Monday, February 4th: Fiction Addict
Friday, February 8th: Unabridged Chick
Monday, February 11th: Pornokitsch – guest post
Tuesday, February 12th: Crime Fiction Lover
Wednesday, February 13th: Book Hooked Blog
Friday, February 15th: Book Reviews by Elizabeth A. White
Monday, February 18th: Raging Bibliomania
Wednesday, February 20th: Bibliophiliac
Tuesday, February 26th: Luxury Reading
Friday, March 15th: Books on the Brain – author guest post
Tuesday, March 19th: Jen’s Book Thoughts