A review by trike
Damnation Alley by Roger Zelazny

4.0

This movie came out the same year as Star Wars and Close Encounters. It doesn’t hold up as well, but 12-year-old me loved it. I immediately bought the book and loved that, too. It didn’t hurt that I lived in Dayton, Ohio, and the main character, Hell Tanner, had to drive around the radioactive crater that was Dayton. We were a prime target for Soviet nukes back in the day.

I still think this is a great passage:

Something big and batlike swooped through the tunnel of his lights and was gone. He ignored its passage. Five minutes later it made a second pass, this time much closer, and he fired a magnesium flare. A black shape, perhaps forty feet across, was illuminated, and he gave it two five-second bursts from the fifty-calibers. It fell to the ground and did not return again.

To the squares, this was Damnation Alley. To Hell Tanner, this was still the parking lot.