On the Road Again: James Sallis’s Neo-Noir Fiction

James Sallis’s Death Will Have Your Eyes (1997), Drive (2005), and Driven (2012) comprise a triad of neo-noir narratives that exploit but also undercut the American archetype of the open road as a mythic space of possibility. Like picaresque antiheroes, the protagonists of these minimalist novels find themselves caught up in webs of suspicion and pursuit that they can evade only by recourse to perpetual movement. In the course of their peripatetic journeys the main characters find temporary escape from victimization, but ultimately they know only the grey and depleted horizons of landscapes already traversed. In this regard Sallis’s neo-noir fiction reveals an affinity to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006).