With American Drifter, Amy Hoff, author of the Caledonia series of urban fantasy novels, recounts tales from her transient life lived along the highways and back roads of America. Although the stories are lifted from reality, they are quickly recognisable as coming from a writer of fantasy, with rich descriptions of the emptiness of the countless miles of tarmac stretching endlessly into the distance conjuring settings that could have come right out of a fictional dreamscape.
Some chapters run several pages while others are as short as a few simple paragraphs, but each gets right to its point, be it about food, places, people or survival, and relates them with perfect clarity and without agenda or embellishment. Although a little disjointed to begin with, they soon weave into a full account of a lifestyle and an age both on the verge of passing into history as the ever-advancing world becomes an increasingly smaller place; a life of diners, dive bars, cheap motels and ephemeral friendships, and a place within a sprawling populace that forms an ethereal realm where people recognise and take care of their own outwith the regular society that has no place for them.
This semi-mythologised lifestyle of isolated freedom is something many people imagine themselves undertaking, and it’s easy to see the appeal of the abandonment of responsibility and being answerable to nobody but yourself. However, such thoughts often fail to take into account that embarking on such an existence would merely exchange the constraints of society with a personal accountability that requires an almost permanent vigilance to survive one week to the next. Hoff’s writing makes this point clear without condescension or judgement, merely revealing the inherent realities that come as part of a life consisting of just you, your car and no more possessions than you can carry.
A folklorist by speciality, Hoff is a collector of stories, and her wide travels exposed her to a plethora of wonderfully obscure tales that sit perfectly alongside the geography, history and practicality anecdotes that make up the bulk of the book. The wonder of the everyday her travels have revealed might just make you believe that, somewhere in the untamed wilderness of those desolate corners of the world upon which humanity does not impinge, magic is still real and the entities of myth have yet to be completely driven from the earth. There is even the suggestion that as one of the last American drifters, Hoff and those like her could themselves eventually become part of modern-day folklore; mysterious figures blowing in from nowhere on the dry dusty wind by the light of a setting sun, settling only briefly and then gone without a trace, their restless souls driving them forever forwards towards the call of the open road.
American Drifter is a thoroughly personal chronicle of a singular and solitary existence, but also an enthralling look at a way of life fast disappearing, and a salute to its passing.
AMERICAN DRIFTER / AUTHOR: AMY HOFF / PUBLISHER: EREBUS SOCIETY / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
