Bob Freville is back with DRIVE-THRU, a biting satire!

Hi, friends! Well, it's finally here. Whamageddon is upon us and we couldn't be more scared, could we? Knowing that at any moment, George Micheal and his utterly forgettable cohort could appear like a pipe dream and drag us into oblivion? Enough to immobilize even the happiest of us during this holiday season, but I say rage. Rage against the threat of George Michael and let your bizarre flag of holiday cheer fly. Happy festivus for the rest of us!

I know I'm in a dwindling minority as someone who truly loves the holiday season and all of its sights, sounds, tastes and smells, so you'll be happy to know that I brought you a caustic antidote to holiday cheer: Bob Freville, author of THE FILTHY MARAUDERS and THE PROUD & THE DUMB, is back with a full novel of biting satire, DRIVE-THRU.

"A hack writer, a reluctant heroin dealer, an arrogant rich kid, an aspiring gangsta and two very dissatisfied women. What do they all have in common? More than they would like to admit.

After a drive-thru trip fails to produce desired fast-food items, five strangers find themselves trapped in an empty fast-food restaurant with a racist robot and an all-out narrator. utterly despicable.< /p>

As paranoia sets in and tensions escalate, the group uses stereotypes and superstitions in their effort to make sense of their mysterious situation. What follows is a cruel satire that challenges everything we think we know about addiction, freedom, casual dining, consumerism and cannibalism."

Cruel is an appropriate term. Bob Freville pretty much hates you. Not you, you. You are awesome. But the You who is America that walks around with a roller coaster and speaks with one broken voice and says "I want it easy and cheap and I want it now." We refer to the Karens and the Kens, the Kardashians and the Kennedys, the catatonic and the bullied.

Like an impressionist painter, Fréville begins with broad strokes that seem too broad to be art, but as he articulates negative space and peppers in minute detail, an image of eerie clarity begins to form before our eyes - a pastiche of Kierkegaard, Kesey and Keynes. As our six cores become investigators of their own predicament, they engage in armchair philosophies that complement and clash, stirring the pot of their tense soup. Like insects in a jar, they look at each other, insult each other and lash out as their imprisonment freezes and lengthens. All of these proceedings are largely narrated by Christian, a self-loathing editor who oscillates between a flimsy sense of selflessness and a bitter disdain for everything inside and outside of his own skin. It is his conclusions that sharpen the detail of the world the reader observes, and to define it as unreliable is to belie the weight of this satire as an indictment of our incessant need to codify and assess each person, place. , action, concept or piece. which lands in our microcosm. Christian, like all of us, wants to believe he has it all figured out, even if he actively struggles and doesn't. The delirium present throughout his rants is indicative of our own collective and individual wading pools in the wake of the 2020 pandemic; DRIVE-THRU is less a dirty mirror than a harrowing and embarrassing historical document.

Christian is, in fact, "completely despicable", but there is also much to appreciate in his procedural comment. It quickly turns out that he is intelligent, but also that this intelligence is treated as a curse that alienates him from the people around him, from the strangers he never meets to the partner next to him who has become a stranger because he voluntarily spreads the chasm that has grown between them. He laments past and present lovers as mistakes, and even makes a big deal of it on the inside. It's a train wreck but at least fun; more TGV and less UNSTOPPABLE.

DRIVE-THRU has surprisingly little to do with fast food, so don't expect a Sinclair-style THE JUNGLE update on our growing fascination with artificiality and depravity in relation to our dietary decline. It's more about us. It's more like Klosterman's SEX, DRUGS, & COCOA PUFFS, in which...