Synopses & Reviews
Wanting desperately to be behind the wheel, Luke Fulmer counts down the days to his sixteenth birthday, when he can finally get his license. Unfortunately, the first thing he does with it is "borrow" his neighbor's car. When he is pulled over and found in possession of an air pistol, a ski mask, a stolen TV, and a bag of pot, the unforgiving local magistrate takes scissors to his license and vows to lock him up if he ever stands in front of her again. So with an absent father and a mother descending into alcoholism, he moves in with his older brother, Nick, an easygoing ex-con who wants to steer Luke onto the straight and narrow. In the summer that follows, Luke contends with a kleptomaniac girlfriend, a duffel bag full of cocaine, and the realization that he must save his family from themselves, even as he plots to beat a path out of town.
In his hilarious, unforgettable debut -- with everything from stock car racing to drug dealing -- Dallas Hudgens brilliantly evokes Southern culture in a tale that is raucous and wrenching, funny and wise.
Review
"Drive Like Hell takes corners at 90 miles an hour to deliver the goods."
-- South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Review
"Uproarious."
-- The San Diego Union-Tribune
Review
"The twang and the heartbreak are real. Hank Williams would be proud, and deeply amused."
-- Los Angeles Times
Review
"The writing is splendid. Hudgens has captured these characters and this milieu with heartbreaking veracity."
-- The Charlotte Observer
Review
"Dallas Hudgens has done something I always thought was impossible: He's written the Great American Redneck Novel, a kind of bildungsroman of the urban South, complete with racing, wrestling, and lots and lots of drinking and smoking. In doing so, he has created a cast of characters so real to me I thought one of them was going to steal my car. This is a sharp, violent, hilarious, and endearing book. Like its narrator, the young Luke, it doesn't know how good it is."
-- Daniel Wallace, author of Big Fish
Review
"The hard-driving, roughhouse, hell-for-leather energy of the prose; the tragedy and comedy of desperation; the keen sense of living on the razor's edge between hope and hopelessness; the fine pacing and humane treatment of these lives -- there is just so much to recommend this fine book and its brilliant author."
-- Lewis Nordan, author of Boy with Loaded Gun
Review
"Drive Like Hell is, quite simply, the funniest book I've ever read -- equal parts Huck Finn, Jack Kerouac, and deep-fried mischief. Remarkably, though, woven through every moment of hilarity is a perfect rendering of time and place and the melancholy of hard-knocks living. I loved the book's men, women, and coming-of-age boy, rooted for them on every page. Dallas Hudgens is a wizard, and his novel is a joy."
-- Martin Clark, author of The Many Aspects of Mobile Home Living
Review
"Funny, fast, and dead-on with the details."
-- The Roanoke Times
Review
"Hilarious...Hudgens's first is so much fun that it's easy to forget how difficult it is to portray decent people acting like morons with an artfulness sufficient to transform it into boneheaded genius."
-- Kirkus Reviews (starred)
About the Author
Dallas Hudgens is a native of Georgia. He is the author of the novel Drive Like Hell and has contributed to The Washington Post