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Caleb and Lenny have broken down on these roads. And the only thing that they hate more than that, the stifling heat, and the fact they have no food, is each other.

J Daniel Sawyer’s novella opens in the sort of situation we’ve all been in from time to time. The car breaks down, you run out of fuel, the train is early for once stranding you in a station slightly smaller than your wardrobe in sub-zero temperatures for an hour until the next train comes. That kind of thing. Travel is easy and fun a lot of the time as long as you’re actually travelling and when that stops happening? That’s when things start getting interesting. That’s when you realise those odd, not quite anywhere roads that I love so much go to all sorts of places that you may not want to be. Your universe shrinks from the glorious, mobile red line of your journey, Indiana Jones-ing your way across the world, to a fading car battery, a single street light, the hum of a bug zapper. It’s always annoying, occasionally hilarious and frequently very scary. As is Sawyer’s novella.

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What follows is a frantic cascade of disaster which plays like a pub crawl, crossed with a spell in purgatory, gone horribly, horribly wrong. Told in admirably laconic first person by Caleb, we follow the world’s most reluctant double act as they find some food (sort of), discover the awful truth about what lies in upstate New York, weaponise pigeons and come face to face with something that would have made Mulder turn to Scully and go, “See? HA! TOLD YOU!” just before they were both eaten.

The pace never lets up, the boys never once catch a break until the very end and the whole thing is written with maniacal glee, energy and wit, as well as a very real sense of danger. Whilst nothing here would overly concern Winchester and Winchester, Caleb and Lenny are two normal, and slightly rubbish, guys with absolutely no resources. The situations they get into are fantastical in nature certainly but Sawyer never shies away from the physical impact of what they’re doing, or the danger they’re in. By the end of the book, they both look like 8,000 miles of bad road, which is appropriate, let’s face it.

Sawyer excels at this sort of horror comedy, even managing what very few other authors do; marrying plot, punchline and character to create a surprisingly sweet whole. This is, at its core, a story about Caleb and Lenny learning how to get on again and Sawyer has a keen, very observant eye when it comes to male character. These two men love one another, in that fraternal, uncomfortable-with-affection, punch-in-the-shoulder way we all recognise, and their willingness to risk everything for the other (even whilst telling them how much they suck) is very sweet. Likewise, the arguments are truly epic, and Sawyer clearly enjoys letting the two of them bicker.