The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana is a story about what happens when bored, discontented, testosterone fuelled boy-men who have grown up with distorted prescriptions for masculinity are left to their own devices and go rouge. It is both disturbing and compelling. 

When two men say hello on the street, one of them loses.

Adam and Teddy have a friendship built on competition, oneupmanship and risk taking in their search for identity in a small town on the west Coast of Canada. They have just finished high school. Adam lives with a father who has banned talk of his mother, and the boy gets much of his advice on life, including how to manipulate girls, from books and podcasts. Teddy has a girlfriend, but is unsure about the man he wants to be. Both want to be seen and to be witnessed.

The road though! Endless becoming, a colour palette always and somehow never changing, grey to green to brown to blue to other, occasionally red, very occasionally yellow, whoosh, repeat, repeat, something comes the other way with headlights on, the beauty of headlights in daylight, fence, field, these lane markings like perforations maybe, as if the road or the whole world could unzip any moment now, if there were such a thing as a moment when you’re driving, which Teddy realizes there isn’t. It’s just one long stretch. The road and its contradictions: boredom and excitement, you sit still but you’re moving, there’s a good kind of silence even with the engine noise and the German metal Adam has them listening to. Teddy’s mom used to call this sitting and thinking time. But all Teddy wants to think about is how the world keeps rushing toward them then dropping harmlessly into their wake. 

The boys hatch a plan to go on a road trip and drive as far as they can. They do not tell their families. When they stop so Teddy can buy a gun, we become certain this trip will end badly. They drive on in the sweltering van – unwashed, tormented by insects, fuelled by energy drinks and chips during the day, and bourbon at night. When they chance across a young couple on the side of the road and make a fatal decision, the reader knows there is no going back and we descend into the young men’s inner worlds as they unravel without remorse.   

Both start unconsciously paring their sentences, seeing how minimal they can make them and still be understood

The Passenger Seat is a skilfully crafted debut novel infused with menace and fear. Its sparse prose holds the reader in tension from the outset and leaves them with a lingering discomfort.