Kissing Asphalt: A Drifter Adventure

by Jack Ewing

Young Americans take to the road in droves during the volatile 1960's. Some flee a military draft that demands they kill or be killed in a war halfway around the world. Others search for excitement, a... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0595123104
• ISBN13: 9780595123100
• Release Date: August 2000
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Length: 292 Pages
• Weight: 1.04 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Style, humor and imagination

The story is told in the voice of the central character and it's a quirky, completely personal voice that makes you feel you've known this guy for years, or at least since yesterday when he bummed a ride in your truck. It opens in an intriguing way with his chance discovery of a woman's naked body near a river. Now what would you do? Grab a shovel and start to bury it? I don't think so, but that's what this guy does, and everything else seems to flow from that one naïve mistake.It's a deceptively intricate plot: maybe because the author is called "Jack" and this is a "road" story you keep expecting the rambling, anarchic series of adventures that a Jack Kerouac would have given you, but what you actually get is a clear-headed tightly-plotted crime/mystery/adventure story, culminating in a superb acid-enhanced climax which ties up almost all of the loose ends but leaves you hungry for more, which is fortunate as the author tells us that this is to be the first of a series.Ewing is a gifted and economical story-teller, who paints his characters and scenes vividly, in strikingly original images. This is radio rather than television, your imagination is engaged all of the time: Ewing gives you just enough to construct the scene in your mind, the narrative is never laboured or intrusive.Unlike Kerouac's Sal Paradise, Ewing's central character does not set out deliberately to be a loner or to live some new concept of the free life: it just happens that way for reasons that eventually become clear. In many respects he's a lot more believable. All the characters he encounters are memorable, convincing and three-dimensional, even though the author at one point, in a mood of self-mockery perhaps, describes a group of them as cardboard cut-outs. The story is engaging, the pacing lively, and the ending truly memorable. I don't think you'll be disappointed in this one.

Buy this Book if you like crime fiction or the 1960s era

If you like noir crime adventures with dark family secrets and lots of vivid metaphors (a la Raymond Chandler or Ross MacDonald), you're going to love this book. It's set in the freewheeling 1960s, and there's enough mystery, intrigue, romance, and violent action to keep you turning the pages all night. People who don't particularly like mysteries should not be dissuaded from reading KISSING ASPHALT. This well-written novel also features flying saucer sightings, weird rural characters, an intense love affair, and The Mother of All Snowstorms. In short, this is a very original work of fiction.It's not a detective story, per se, but it contains many classical elements of that genre, including bad-apple cops, hardboiled prose, fallen angels, eavesdropped conversations, and skin-of-the-teeth escapes. The narrator's brooding, world-weary tone evokes images of a young Bogart or Mitchum-in black and white, of course.The plot of KISSING ASPHALT is based around flight and eluding one's enemies. Ewing's first-person protagonist struggles to avoid a group of pursuers who accuse him of a crime he did not commit. The action is tense and breathless. Subplots emerge from the bizarre crimes he uncovers and his dangerous affair with the lonely Idaho beauty who agrees to hide him.The narrator suffers much--and he doesn't hesitate to describe this suffering in detail, through tightly clenched teeth. Suffering is part of his shiftless, distrustful persona, readers will come to learn. Toward book's end, you'll discover the dark secret that has kept this unlikely hero drifting from town to town.Ewing describes sensations sparely but in great detail-so that every smell, sight, sound, or stab of pain becomes part of the action. Characters are well-drawn and complex. Metaphors and analogies are wonderfully original, and readers of classic detective fiction will get a real kick out of them. Some examples: "Stars glittered like broken glass. The moon was a half-eaten marshmallow stuck on a snow-capped peak." Or: "Eve was all over me, like Elmer's Glue." Or: "Boys in Army getup, alike as gingerbread soldiers, stuffed duffels at their feet ..."If you enjoy page-turning action, a spare-but-descriptive prose style, and original material, give this great new book a read.