Hobo Horror
Good stories put a quiet spell on me. Whether they arrive as books, films, or video games, what lingers afterward, often for far longer than I expect, isn’t the glossy, polished shell so many media try to sell these days, but the people inside and the moments that temper them into something tougher and wiser. That is why adventures pull me in. Maniac Mansion, Leisure Suit Larry, and The Secret of Monkey Island don’t just tell varied, engaging tales - they let me stand close enough to feel them. And sometimes the mood can tilt darker, which suits me fine. So it does in the pulp thriller The Drifter, where the light thins and the edges grow hard.
In The Drifter we follow Mick Carter as he is hauled headfirst into a tangled web of shady corporations, murder, and a madman’s thousand-year obsession. The hobo has been adrift for a while, trading one job for another, never staying long anywhere. He jumps a freight car toward the town he once called home, witnesses a brutal killing, is chased by high-tech soldiers, thrown into a reservoir, and drowned. That, however, is only the beginning of his trouble. His consciousness comes loose and is forced back into his body mere seconds before death. He ends up wanted for the murder he saw, tormented by his own past, and stalked by the conviction that something from the far side is on his trail.
What begins as supposed fantasies in a middle-aged loser’s head swiftly becomes a layered adventure suspended between a tragic past and a future that looks spent. The story moves Mick along at a sure pace, one situation to the next, with barely a breath in between. One moment he’s assembling a Molotov cocktail from a bottle of high-proof rum. The next he’s interrogating a corrupt neurosurgeon. Before long he has to swing out of a high-rise window on a frayed extension cord. The Drifter is a gripping rollercoaster of feeling, its lineages easy to sense: Steven King, Michael Crichton, and John Carpenter, with a trace of 1970s Australian grindhouse. In the end, good stories never die out.