No Exit

“Then she saw it: a half-buried green sign in a snow berm to her right. It crept up on her, catching the glow of her Honda’s dirty headlights in a flash: 365 DAYS SINCE THE LAST FATAL ACCIDENT.”

Darby initially views this sign announcing a full calendar year since the last time there was an accident on the highway near the rest stop where she will soon be stranded as indicating that a future accident is “due.” While this reads as tongue-in-cheek to an audience who knows they are reading a thriller, the irony of this statement further unfolds when none of the abundant violence in the novel proves accidental, though much of it is fatal.

“Maybe she’d make a few Facebook friends and learn how to play poker. Or maybe she’d go sit in her Honda and freeze to death. Both options were equally enticing.”

Darby’s cavalier attitude toward her own death at the beginning of the novel is both an opposition to her later determination to survive and a curious parallel to her view at the very end of the novel. Though the Darby in the novel’s final chapters is not eager for death and is not cavalier about it, she does consider death to save Jay potentially worth the cost.

“Everyone here was guilty until proven innocent.”

This inversion of the legal tenet “innocent until proven guilty” highlights an anxiety that is central to the “whodunit”-style chapters at the beginning of the novel. Faced with four strangers and knowing one of them has trapped a child in a van, Darby cannot trust any of them until she determines definitive guilt. Unlike in a true “whodunit,” however, in which suspects are gradually eliminated, Darby learns that nearly everyone in the rest stop is, in fact, guilty.

“‘It’s always the nice guy,’ Ashley said. ‘Again, I don’t really read, but I’ve seen a lot of movies, and that’s even better. Whoever seems like the nicest character, at first, will always turn out to be the asshole in the end.’”

Ashley’s playful comment is on the surface about the mystery novel that Sandi reads while they wait in the rest stop. Below the surface, however, it is foreshadowing—not only of the reveal that he is one of the kidnappers, but also of his playful sense of evil, which leads him to delight in dropping clues and hinting at his duplicity in front of witnesses.

“She couldn’t decide what was scarier—seeing Rodent Face, or not seeing him.”

The tension caused by the unseen antagonist hearkens back to a trope in the horror genre, wherein the invisible villain is frequently more frightening than the visible one—a conceit often deployed in horror films. This reference to a horror trope underscores the places in which No Exit also exhibits qualities of the horror genre.

“This was America, where cops and robbers carry guns. Where, as the NRA tells us, the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. Hokey, but true as hell. She’d never even handled a firearm before, let alone shot one, but she’d sell her soul to have one right now.”

This excerpt, in the context of the novel, reveals No Exit’s political ambivalence about issues related to gun restriction. While the invocation of the NRA reads as critical of the organization, Darby’s assessment that their claim is “true as hell” suggests that the novel’s protagonist, at least, is not entirely opposed to the sentiment. The novel ultimately does not provide a concrete stance regarding these issues as, in the climax, Darby is shot by a police officer (a negative event within the context of the plot) and Jay shoots Ashley (a positive event within the context of the plot).

“She’d always loved her stimulants […] Darby preferred to live her life wide-eyed, tormented, running, because nothing can catch you if you never stop.”

Darby’s assessment of her own character presents a facet of her identity that will change by the novel’s conclusion. Though she spends a great deal of the novel running (and indeed tormented), she is, in fact, caught several times. By the text’s conclusion, however, she is tired of running and elects instead to face her tormentor head-on.

“Then Ashley grabbed her face, his palms to her cheeks—

‘Wait—’

—And he mashed her mouth to his.

What?”

Adams here adapts a trope from another genre, the romance, to create misdirection and suspense in the novel. Ashley’s decision to suddenly kiss Darby to “protect” them from being discovered by Lars (who, at this point in the novel, Darby believes to be the sole kidnapper) draws from romance or romantic suspense. The implication is that the couple who must kiss to avoid detection will ultimately fall in love. Adams’s use of the trope leads readers to believe that Ashley and Darby will becomes allies when, in fact, Ashley will become the novel’s primary antagonist. Trope expectations serve as a red herring to lead readers astray from Ashley’s true identity.

“And those green dragon eyes kept staring back at her, full of secrets. Jewel-like, scanning her body, assessing her dimensions, running contingencies and what ifs. They were frighteningly intelligent in all the ways Lars’s had been frighteningly dumb. But it was an icy intelligence.”

Darby’s understanding of Ashley at this point in the novel leads her to believe him to be more powerful than he is—hence her comparison of him to a dragon. Her assessment of his intelligence and cunning will wane as the novel goes on, until she will view his plan as being shoddy and hasty. This transformation from a dragon (an unbeatable foe) back into a mere man signifies that Darby can—and does—triumph over him.

“For the next sixty seconds or so, Darby’s life depended on how light a sleeper this middle-aged woman was.”

Darby’s assessment of her safety while Sandi sleeps and Ed is out of the building indicates the fragility of circumstances as the novel’s tension increases. As with so many incidents in the text that Darby considers to be absolute, however, this assumption that Ashley will not kill in front of witnesses proves false, particularly considering that Sandi is later revealed to be in on the plot.

“[Kenny] was genuinely decent to four-year-old Lars, too—letting him carry tools in the workshop, teaching him how to shoot crows with a BB gun.”

Ashley’s justification for why he did not report his uncle Kenny when, as a child, he discovered that Kenny was running a sex-trafficking operation out of his underground bunker reveals that the kind of behavior that Ashley considers “genuinely decent” varies from the exploitative (allowing a child to do work for him) to the grotesque (teaching a toddler to kill birds). This parallels Ashley’s own relationship with his brother; though he professes to love Lars, he also tortures him with a nail gun for any perceived infraction.

“Jay froze there on her hands and knees, peering out into the darkness. Thousands of swirling snowflakes. A shivery gust of night air. A parking lot of smooth, undisturbed white, glittering with crystals. It was strangely thrilling. She’d never seen this much snow before in her entire life.”

Jay’s childlike perspective offers a moment of beauty in what is otherwise a gritty and violent novel. The child from San Diego takes a moment to admire the marvel of the natural world even while she is in the midst of being kidnapped. This scene suggests that though the snow is frequently characterized as a hostile force throughout the novel, that is a human ascription rather than an inherent one, as nature has the potential to be as majestic as it does deadly.

“Possible death at the hands of the Garver brothers was still better than certain death in a subzero blizzard. Right? It made sense, but she still despised herself for lying.”

Darby’s simultaneous rationalization and regret demonstrate the moral dilemma she faces as she unwillingly helps Ashley and Lars locate Jay after the little girl has escaped, presumably into the blizzard, for which she is unequipped. Darby’s ability to do what she thinks is best even when that thing is unsavory offers her the tools she needs to survive the violence that is to come in the novel.

“She still could have saved Jay. (And Mom still would have pancreatic cancer.)”

This parenthetical offers one of the rare cases in which Darby explicitly connects her ability (or inability) to save Jay with her inability to protect her mother from terminal cancer. This is a connection that Darby, evidently, is only able to face when she believes Jay to have died in the snow; after she discovers that Jay is, in fact, alive in the rest stop, Darby does not articulate this connection again.

“The fun, as always, was deciding how. He’d been through dozens of Lars’s pets—turtles, fish, two dogs, more shelter-rescue cats than he could count—and whether it was bleach, bullets, fire, or the meaty click of a knife striking bone, there was no dignity in death. Every living creature dies afraid.”

This excerpt, taken from Ashley’s narration, indicates the longstanding violence that he has committed simply for the enjoyment of it—which derives apparently not only from harming the animals themselves, but from destroying something that Lars cares for.

“Ashley’s [nail gun] model was bright Sesame Street–orange. Sixteens pounds […] Nails fed from a cylindrical machine, which had always reminded Ashley of the drum on John Dillinger’s tommy gun. The nail[s…] could penetrate human flesh from up to ten feet away, and even at distances beyond that, they were still twirling shades of vicious metal, screaming through the air at nine hundred feet per second.

Cool, right?”

Ashley’s description of his preferred weapon demonstrates what Darby calls his “playful sort of evil” (72). In likening the weapon he uses for torturing others to the children’s TV show Sesame Street, he implies that killing is, to him, a game. His fashioning himself after legendary gunman John Dillinger demonstrates the self-aggrandizing egotism that leads him to consider himself blameless even as he commits numerous acts of violence.

“See, when Wall Street failed, the feds stepped in and bailed them out with other people’s money. When your little mom-and-pop outfit fails, well, you have to take the bailout into your own hands. It’s the American way.”

Adams here presents a further instance of political ambivalence. Though the tone he strikes here does not suggest that the Wall Street bailout, which disproportionately privileged very large businesses while providing little aid to small ones, receives the text’s support, Ashley’s equivalence is transparently false, as his version of a “bailout” is selling a child into a sex-trafficking ring.

“She’d already been shot at, pepper-sprayed, and nearly asphyxiated with a Ziploc bag, and like a goddamn cockroach, she’d survived everything Ashley and Lars—and even Sandi—had thrown at her. Against all odds, Darby was still in this fight. It was too personal, this eight-hour psychological duel with Ashley, all the night’s tricks and turns and wins and losses. And now she had to witness her grisly checkmate. She wanted to be there the second it happened, to see the shock on Ashley’s face when the first approaching police car flashed red and blue. It thrilled her, in a dark way she couldn’t describe.”

Darby’s desire to see Ashley receive his comeuppance after the numerous violent acts he has inflicted on her underscores the personal conflict that emerges in the psychological portion of this thriller. While she thinks that she has been harmed by three people over the course of the night, it is Ashley specifically whom she wants to see arrested, suggesting that she understands that they are the primary combatants in this narrative. For her to understand this as “dark,” however, implies that Darby’s version of darkness is far less dark than Ashley’s.

“Death is supposed to transform you from a person into an idea. But to Darby, her mother had always been an idea. Somehow, after eighteen years of living in the same tiny two-bedroom house in Provo, eating the same food, watching the same television, she’d never truly known who Maya Thorne was. Not as a human being.”

Darby’s mournful thoughts after her mother dies show both the grief of how a person can never be entirely known and the struggle of an adult child to recognize that their parent is a fully developed human being. For Darby, losing her mother before they could reconcile robs her of the possibility of ever getting to know the woman as a full person.

“‘Is he telling the truth?’ Jay asked. Darby sighed. ‘I don’t think even he knows.’”

Darby’s response to Jay’s question about Ashley’s lies shows the depth of the antagonist’s deceit; he lies so frequently and so intensively that Darby is uncertain if even Ashley knows the difference. Her dismissive sigh, meanwhile, suggests that what Ashley says is irrelevant to their combat, as what he will do proves increasingly to be the sole important factor.

“The visitor center erupted into towering flames behind them, tongues of fire pumping a column of filthy smoke. It climbed the sky, a furious tornado-swirl of glowing embers. The size and closeness of it was overwhelming.”

The heat of the exploded visitor center is here likened to a dangerous weather pattern, the “furious tornado-swirl,” which serves as an inversion of the blizzard that has troubled the novel’s protagonists throughout the text. Once the building has exploded, the weather is not further referenced as a problem; indeed, only moments later, a snowplow arrives, providing rescue from the storm. The heat of the fire thus supplants the danger of the cold.

“He hadn’t heard anything, but somehow he just knew. Something about the way the hairs on his neck lifted and pickled, like static electricity…

She’s behind me.

Right now.”

This moment recalls a previous one when Darby, encountering Lars for the first time in Chapter 2, realizes Lars is behind her without seeing him. This introduction of the threat that is the Garver brothers is here mimicked when Ashley, running from Darby for the first time, realizes she is behind him with Lars’s gun. Just as Lars does not defeat Darby, however, Darby does not here defeat Ashley, as she is shot following the inopportune arrival of Ron Hill.

“So bargain-bin Captain America here had no choice but to fire. He had to shoot her. That’s just how it works, you know.”

Ashley’s analysis of the policeman shooting Darby is at once gleeful and dismissive. He both ascribes a sense of patriotism to the office and simultaneously denigrates it. Ironically, this supposed patriotic behavior is a rationalization he has used, throughout the novel, to support his own actions. The emphasis on “had” casts Ashley in the role of the one making the report of the incident, which puts him in the shoes of the same officer he is mocking—and whom he kills moments later.