Darby Thorne's mother has horrible timing. She would choose to be dying of pancreatic cancer in Utah just as a blizzard blows through the Rockies, trapping Darby on top of a mountain pass overnight.

I don't know if author Taylor Adams intentionally chose NO EXIT for this book's title, the same title as Sartre's existential work from the 20th century. But the two certainly contain the same central idea: hell is other people.

In Darby's case, the people in question are four fellow stranded motorists sheltering at the Wanashono rest stop in Colorado. As Adams makes sure to tell the reader several times, Wanashono translates to "big devil" in a Native American dialect.

And who might the big devil be in this story? There's not much mystery about it. In an unsuccessful quest for cell service, Darby stumbles past a van in the parking lot. The flashlight on her phone illuminates -- for the briefest moment -- a tiny hand reaching through bars in the back. Process of elimination quickly reveals who the driver -- and thus kidnapper -- must be.

What was going to be an inconvenient night quickly becomes life-or- death. How can Darby rescue the child when her '94 Civic can't even get out of the parking lot? And who, if anyone, can she trust to help her?

This thriller feels like Stephen King for millennials. All the same horrors are hidden in human nature (lying, scheming, violence), plus the added weirdness of being a young person today. I'm as tied to my iPhone as anyone else. What would I do if I were stranded somewhere in bad weather? I'd call for help, I'd search for the nearest town, I'd Google survival tips. In this story, one of the scariest specters is that of Darby's dying phone battery. She has (of course) forgotten her charger at home in her haste.

There was something else timely about reading NO EXIT in January 2018: the resonances with the story of Jayme Closs were hard to ignore. Just like Jayme, Jay (even the names are similar) is taken, hidden away, never far from civilization but utterly to break into it.

Truly, hell is other people.

VoirSeries