When the electricity inexplicably goes out nationwide, the mundanities
of life gradually shift to the rigours of survival. In this
post-apocalyptic setting, an unnamed mechanic jumps into his beat-up car
and drives east, journeying 4,736 kilometres to reach his dying father.
As the narrator's journey becomes one of essentials - gasoline, fresh
water only in bottles, and gas-station food - and as the crisis
engulfing his surroundings begins to weigh on him ever more, he seeks
refuge in a woman, and later, with a fellow traveller he meets on the
road. These two kindred souls join him on his path, though they seem to
seek a different sort of redemption.
As the road grows longer, and the narrator's exhaustion grows in kind,
parallels are drawn between his own journey and Thesus's journey through
the primeval Labyrinth. However, the beast that our narrator seeks to
slay might not be one of flesh and horn and blood; instead, it is his
own failing mental state and his thirst for the apocalypse around him.
In the end, the obsession with which he pursues this beast will be his
undoing.
Running on Fumes, is a road novel that carries with it influences of
the genre, with its storylines of redemption through distance travelled,
often in a failing world that reflects the protagonist's interior. It is
a hazy line that delineates whether the world is reflecting the
narrator's state or whether the narrator's mindset is reflected by the
world, and there remains a level of uncertainty on the truths the
narrator speaks.
