Book Review: The Suicide Motor Club by Christopher Buehlman
Berkley Books
(This review contains full spoilers.)
The Suicide Motor Club opens with a family traveling west on Route 66 and failing to make the most of their final moments together.
Eight-year-old Glendon Lamb is coloring in the backseat, one arm periodically drifting to the open window that will be his doom. His mother, Judith, is seeking his attention rather than engaging with her husband, Robert, who broods in the driver’s seat with an uncomfortable truth behind his lips that will come out when he’s good and ready. It’s 1967 and Route 66 is declining, with classic muscle cars and family caravans crisscrossing its winding length in search of an America that dried up a decade before.
As night falls, a black Camaro with its headlights off pulls up alongside the Lambs’ Falcon and a tall man snatches Glendon through the open window. A vicious wreck instigated by the Camaro’s accomplice follows, and we jump to a hospital scene where Robert is breathing his last as his (now revealed) mistress berates him, and Judith, battered but alive, realizes that she will walk out the doors of the hospital alone.
What follows is a path of begrudged vengeance that wends its way from the walls of a convent, to the hideout of a super-secret organization of vampire hunters, to a burned out hotel where Judith meets her most unlikely ally. It’s a journey whose twists don’t always make perfect sense, but also one that manages to keep its reader for at least most of the way there.
Cracks in the Engine Block
As this is the first Christopher Buehlman book I’ve reviewed for the site, I have to provide some backstory. I think he’s arguably the finest voice in modern horror, with many of his works vastly eclipsing the quality of his more famous peers. His fantasy debut, The Blacktongue Thief, was my favorite novel of 2021, and his most-lauded work, Those Across the River, ranks among the five best horror novels of all time in my mind.
That being said, The Suicide Motor Club is the first time I wasn’t enamored with one of Chris’s novels. The novel isn’t bad–I would have been quite pleased with it coming from a new author–but it came up short in ways none of his other novels (I’ve read all but one) have. The feeling of rich immersion and perfect prose that made The Lesser Dead and Those Across the River so memorable just wasn’t there, and the ramshackle group of wanton vampires that serve as antagonists came up feeling thin and caricatured with so many of the characters striking the same brutal–but ultimately dull–note.
In this case, Chris is a victim of his own brilliance. He has me trained to want more.
The Good Guys Want What?
Similarly, Judith, the widow-turned-nun, ultimately lacks any moral imperative beyond seeking her missing son. This seems to undermine the various means of coping she sought in the wake of the opening incident. This single-mindedness is commendable in circumstances, but always falls a bit flat in fiction, at least for me. Further, her one true ally in the book is an elder vampire repulsed by the wantonness of Buehlman’s younger progeny, but his ultimate reason for helping her seems to be that he…has a crush on her?
Really? It can be dressed up in half-chapters and fanciful musings, but it still doesn’t amount to anything substantial from a reader’s perspective. The idea that there was nothing more to his decision to switch sides than this just didn’t work for me.
The author also elects to do something I found very strange and ultimately ineffective–little episodic telegrams where a subchapter would focus exclusively on a character that came into contact with our roving band of undead murderers. We’d learn a bit about these people, what brought them to their place along Route 66, be it birth or hard luck, and more often than not see them into their early grave at the hands of the vampires.
I love anecdotal stuff like this typically, but CB retreated to it so many times in this novel that I found myself muttering a very uncharacteristic ‘okay, but tell me more about the bad guys, or what the nun is doing.’ It’s almost like he knew something in the primary narrative wasn’t quite there, and went seeking it.
I don’t spoil the ending in book reviews, opting to leave the last thirty- or forty-percent of the novel to be discovered, hoping I’ve given a good enough overview of what to expect. Unfortunately, this one doesn’t have a lot to uncover. There are some token grasps at what life might be beyond the events of the book should Judith succeed, and a couple decent twists near the close, but unfortunately these focus on the bad guys, which are the least interesting aspect of the novel.
I Still Love You, Chris
This feels like something Buehlman needed to get out of his system; a residual interest in vampire stories after penning the exquisitely excellent Lesser Dead, coupled with a love of all the Americana that surrounds Route 66 a decade after its decline began. Chris has certainly earned the right to explore such an impulse, and if you’ve not read one of his books, The Suicide Motor Club is actually a great place to start. It shows the green shoots of his talent, popping up in backstory and revelations, but ultimately the course of the novel itself is just too straightforward to deserve much aplomb.
Verdict: 6.4/10
Strengths:
Even not at his best, Buehlman has more style than 90% of authors
The characters are initially interesting, even if that doesn’t hold
There’s a goofiness about the vampire hunters that I can appreciate
Weaknesses:
Main plot is pretty straightforward, with few surprises
Flat protagonists
Unlike The Lesser Dead, there’s nothing unique about these vampires
You can purchase this book at Amazon, or preferably, through an independent bookstore in your community.
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