From Ed Gorman (2014)
Forgotten Books: Cross Country by Herbert Kastle
Herbert D. Kastle wrote a number of science fiction stories in magazines
of the 1950s. That's where I first read him. Later in the 1960s he was
writing those fat sexy bestseller-type novels that owed more to
marketing and Harold Robbins than his presumed muse. Then in 1974 he
wrote CROSS COUNTRY. Here's a quote from one of the reviews: "This novel
seems to occupy the same dark and twisted territory as the works of Jim
Thompson. Characters interact in a dance of barely suppressed
psychopathological urges and desires that is as grotesquely fascinating
as a multi-car pileup on the freeway. It may leave you feeling unclean
afterwards, but chances are you will not forget it."
Damn straight. It really is a sewer of sex and terror and blood-soaked suspense. I read it in one long sitting. If it's trash, as some called it at the time, it is spellbinding trash.
IMDB sums up the story line succinctly: "After a woman is found butchered in her New York apartment, suspicion falls on her estranged husband, an ad executive who has suddenly left town on a cross-country road trip. He takes along a beautiful girl he met in a bar and a drifter he picked up along the way. A cop sets out after the husband, but he's more interested in shaking him down than bringing him back."
Kastle masterfully controls his long nightmare journey and you buy into his paranoia. He shows you an American wasteland of truck stops, motels, convenience stores connected by interstate highway and darkness. By book's end, everyone will betray everyone else. This is survival of the fittest enacted by a Yuppie businessman, sociopathic hippies and a crooked cop. The sheer nastiness of Kastle's existential vision make this book impossible to forget. Thirty-some years after I first read it I still think of it from time to time when hundreds of other novels have fled from memory.
It's a vision of hell that fascinates you as it troubles your conscience.
