Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2026 July 08 • Wednesday

The paperback edition of John Buell's The Shrewsdale Exit is presented as a post-Death Wish exploitation novel and it does indeed contain all of the requisite elements. But it isn't really that kind of book.

The cover gives the impression that the whole book will be about a family being terrorized by a motorcycle gang. All of this happens in the first chapter.

Most of the violence occurs off page and the reader learns of some specifics indirectly and clinically. This phlegmatic and understated approach intensifies the impact and the horror of the attack. The very, very old observation of the effectiveness of leaving much to the audience's imagination is reinforced for the zillionth time. Readers of this book might never forget the phrase "sexual savagery".

So what does happen in this book? Well, in one of at least two extremely improbable events that show rather too explicitly the author's hand directing the plot, main character Joe Grant survives the encounter with the bikers while his wife and six-year-old daughter do not.

For a while the book follows the steps of a police procedural while also mapping Grant's having to face his friends and family after surviving this atrocity. He then does what the heroes of Death Wish-type stories do: gets a gun and goes hunting.

But he's actually really bad at shooting guns, having never done it before. Sure, he practices, like they all do, but he still isn't very good. He manages to track down the bikers and lure them into a trap but doesn't do so well and actually ends up in jail himself, charged with attempted murder, while the bikers go free.

This was an unexpected turn of events and I've already said too much about the book's plot.

It's an attempt to take this familiar story in an unfamiliar direction, toward redemption and rebirth instead of vengeance and retribution.

It's very well written and I applaud the effort. In the end it's more impressive than enjoyable or satisfying, though.

The first line is "They decided to pull in at the Howard Johnson's".