WHITE LINE FEVER.....THE ROAD TO YOU-KNOW-WHERE, PAVED WITH APPREHENSION.....(***).

 White Line Fever by K.C. Jones (2025)

     Horror hits the road on a literal Highway to H-E-Double Hockey Sticks.

     This is a familiar primal story for all aficionados of horror books and movies......four girls on a vacation road trip sidetracked on to a notorious 15 mile stretch of highway.. A curving, middle-of-nowhere road littered with stories of wrecked cars and the bodies of drivers and passengers. It's a vehicular version of a roach motel......you drive in, but you don't drive out.

     But these girls will be okay, right? After all, it's only 15 miles, right? Feel free to rub your hands in anticipation of horrific events to befall Livia, Ash, Morgan and Becka as they foolishly navigate their way through this demonic short cut.

     Whatever it is that lurks and stalks County Route 951, it knows what scares you and wastes no time in piercing the girls' secret anxieties and fears;......especially our narrator Livia, a survivor of terrible abuse and cruelty she suffered at the hands of her odious father. Their 15 mile trip evolves into a perilous, almost hallucinatory funhouse ride of 'did-you-hear-that? -Did-you-see-that? sights and sounds.

     My only problem with 'White Line Fever' (as I think it will be for a lot of horror fans) is the overlong, repetitive length of the book. Pretty much the same kind of scares are repeated over and over and over again, which only served to dilute the overall impact. Toward the last third of the book, I felt it was equivalent to watching an 85 minute horror movie that's been stretched out to the running time of 'Lawrence Of Arabia'.

     I did enjoy all of the familiar fearful tropes put into play and the sense of escalating dread built up by each new fresh, nightmarish event thrown into the girls' path. But I also found myself muttering, 'Yeah, I get it, I get it.....their minds are being messed with. C'mon already, move it along'. It's up to each individual reader as to whether they'll roll with this excess or lose patience with it. But I'm sure dedicated, hardcore fans of books to give you bad dreams will want to snap this up in a racing heartbeat minute.

       3 stars (***).