Julian and Brees have a YouTube channel. It's something to do with hunting ghosts and a whole variety of paranormal topics and they're doing pretty well. Their latest instalment sounds cool too. They've discovered County Road 951 in central Oregon, a road previously known as the Old Wending Hollow Highway but colloquially remembered as the Devil's Driveway. It's a mountain road and it's dangerous, not necessarily through geography but through history. It's claimed a lot of lives, especially on the Nightmare Mile, the primary reason why it was closed five years earlier and fenced off.

So they've clipped the chain to get onto the road and their buddy Drew is going to ride it on his dirt bike, fifteen miles out and fifteen miles back with an iPhone mounted on the front to shoot the video for posterity. Given that this is just the prologue, I'm sure you won't be shocked at all to find that this ride doesn't go remotely smoothly for Drew. He's plagued by spiders, crawling inside his helmet. And guilt. And visions. He makes it out but he's travelling at high speed when he exits and doesn't survive the crash. It's a powerful prologue.

What follows is a powerful first chapter as well. Liv has discovered that her husband Brian has been cheating on her and the world that she's carefully constructed around their marriage to pretend that everything's great crumbles away into nothing. She falls apart trying to confront him. She falls right into a panic attack and runs, by car. She has the presence of mind to call him and confirm what she thought and then she crashes too. There are a lot of crashes in this book, arguably more crashes than there are characters, which makes for an interesting statistic.

Unlike Drew, though, she's OK. She's quickly out of the hospital and, while Brian hovers, her female friends from childhood organise a weekend away together at a retreat. Liv and Monica drink as they wait for Ash and Becka to fly in from LA and then they're off on their road trip. Of course, you won't be shocked to find that they're in central Oregon and there's a delay on the road due to an accident, leaving them right by the open fence leading to the Devil's Driveway. It's a quick and convenient way through the mountains to the resort to, so naturally they take it and we dive into the novel proper.

The first thing to know here is that the Devil's Highway is a character here. Sure, it takes many forms as it manifests differently for each of these friends, but it's one character and it wants to play a very large part in this book. I won't spoil what it is, especially as I believe KC Jones made it up out of whole cloth rather than plucking it from a book on supernatural creatures like the one Monica devoured as a child and eventually remembers to help them understand what it's doing to them. It's a memorable character.

The second thing to know here is that everything unfolds in cinematic fashion. There are plenty of jump scares and showcase scenes. Of course, they run their rental car off the road, whoever happens to be driving, and more than once too, but when they do there's something under the car. And then there's another car. There's someone in the trunk. And something in a purse they grab from the front seat. And yet nothing's there when they look again, as tends to be the case when we catch something out of the corner of our eye, look again and realise it's nothing. But here, of course, it's something, just something messing with their minds.

Given that, the third thing to know is that, even given all those jump scares, this is primarily a psychological tale. These four girls used to be the Scoundrels of Scrap back in their youths, the group of inseparable kids we tend to read about in Stephen King stories who get up to all sorts of memorable shenanigans at a crucial point in their young lives and bond forever over it. That time, as King so often told us, was the best time of their lives but it wasn't remotely as perfect as nostalgia tends to paint it. They all had their trauma and the road feeds on that.

They were the Scoundrels of Scrap because Liv's father, Everett Rhodes, ran a junkyard and the favourite pastime they had was to roam it at night, trawling new arrivals for whatever counted as goodies to teenage or near teenage girls. When we first jump back to that time for chapters explaining where all these traumas we're seeing revisited on the road came from, Liv is twelve and about to turn thirteen, but dealing with a psychologically abusive father. Ash and Mo are sisters whose dad's becoming a drunk. Becka was adopted by religious conservatives who keep her away from the normal things normal kids do. Or at least they think they do.

While so many authors of genre novels who use initials are female and hiding that fact from a traditionally misogynistic industry and traditionally judgmental audience, KC Jones is male. It therefore seems rather surprising that he populate his novel with four female leads, but, from my admittedly male perspective as a reader, he seems to do a pretty good job. I'd love to read some reviews from female critics who like to dive deep into things like character to see if he did get this right or not.

What matters is that they have their own individual traumas that the others may understand a little but don't know about in detail, but also their shared traumas as a group of kids. It's not a surprise when we learn that Everett eventually stumbles onto what they've been doing in his junkyard at night and that definitely leads to a pivotal shared trauma. What that means is the close knit group of friends isn't quite as close knit as they might think, especially over a decent passage of time and the road gleefully sparks tensions between them. Ash and Mo are sisters, so have a lifetime of conflict to build on, however close they can be, and Ash married Becka, so there are the tensions of wedlock to deal with too.

I liked this book, though it felt like Jones, perhaps channelling his inner Stephen King, does like to talk so the book runs a little longer than perhaps it should. And, rather appropriately, given that influence, I preferred the chapters dealing with the young Scoundrels of Scrap than those set in the present on the Devil's Driveway. King is always at his best when detailing the rituals of coming of age, especially in a group of kids, and Jones seems to follow suit here. However, he does a strong job in the present-day scenes, less so when we don't know what the road is doing but more so once Mo realises what they're dealing with and thus providing them with the good old ammunition of knowledge to try to counter it.

It also helps that, while Jones isn't afraid to talk, he has a very strong command of language to bring to bear. For all that he was clearly aiming at a cinematic read, he gets inside the minds of his characters very well indeed and the world around them shifts depending on their attitudes and perspectives. That's especially good early on as Liv deals with the revelation that she can't trust her husband and her marriage is over. It's a rook between the eyes for her but her friends all exhibit no surprise whatsoever. None of them tell her, "Duh!" but we feel they want to.

What I keep coming back to as the only real negative is the length, but it's not that long a drive at three-hundred and fifty or so pages. I found it to be a relatively quick read, hardly a struggle even if the ladies—and Julian and Brees, who, of course, eventually rejoin the fray—struggle to navigate a mere fifteen miles. I think what marked it in my brain as long is that much happens before we have any idea what might be causing it. There's certainly little opportunity for us to guess, because this isn't something we can figure out from clues or telegraphing. Thus it starts well but then becomes a litany of jump scares until Mo gets us back on track with a well-timed memory and the Scoundrels of Scrap chapters keep us going up to then.

And, hey, the Nightmare Mile is always still to come. I believe this is only Jones's second horror novel, after 'Black Tide', which was nominated for a Stoker as a first novel. Clearly, he has quite the future ahead of him, just so long as he doesn't drive down County Road 951. ~~ Hal C F Astell