This book contains comic-book adaptations of Stephen King and Joe Hill's collaberative story Throttle, which was written for a Richard matheson tribute anthology, and also the story that Throttle was based on - Duel by Richard Matheson - so memorably made into Spielberg's first full length feature film.
As such, we know that both stories are about a truck with a faceless driver trying to run people off the road.In the Hill/King story, the potential victims are a motorbike gangon their way home from a failed drugs deal.
It also allows for multiple vehicles to be involved and allows the truck to catch a few of them.
Whilst it is a good story it does suffer a little from the fact that the charcaters are not people we want to see survive in the first place.
They also make the mistake of giving the truck driver a motive.This makes the whole thing less of a rollercoaster than the Matheson story.
The artwork is good but not brilliant.
Duel is by far the better of the two stories. The truck driver has no motive other than the poor sod in the car overtook him twice. This makes it far more terrifying as it gives a whole "this could happen to anyone" element to the tale. You don't need to be part of a motorbike gang who did something really bad for this guy to come after you.
I assume the text in this story comes direct from the original short by Matheson. If so, I need to seek that collection out and add it to my exponentially growing TBR. Just the snippets of text by themselves were tension inducing. The artwork adds a whole extra layer of nightmare to this retelling. Everything seems skewed and off kilter. It's ugly but it works beautifully for the story being told.
Being a huge fan of the film, I obviously knew how the story would turn out, but taht didn't stop it from being a truly excellent read.
Available from all good bookshops with a graphic novel section, there's no reason not to seek this one out.
No comments:
Post a Comment