The Lonely Road

Reviewed from an unpolished ARC provided via BookSirens. Final text may differ.

A puppy named Angel. Shot three times. Murder via VHS tape. With a preface explaining how to feel about it.

A jealous, abusive ex-partner returns to terrorise his former partner and shoots the dog in front of both men as an act of control and intimidation. The murder of the protagonist's closest friend arrives on a VHS tape, two hours of recorded torture, delivered in person by the men responsible. The protagonist then takes his own life. This is the novel's climactic architecture. It is also, in every sense, exactly what it sounds like.

I finished this book bewildered. Not disturbed, not moved — bewildered. At what it thinks it is doing. At what it believes the reader will accept. T. M. Delaney's The Lonely Road is an exercise in trauma porn that fails from start to finish: sensation for sensation's sake, deep issues worn as decoration, empty as tin. I am not the target audience. I am genuinely uncertain who is.

There is a version of this book that earns its grief. It does not exist here.

Delaney's prose operates on a single principle: externalise everything. Every psychological state the protagonist carries is rerouted into an object, a spectacle, or a ritual, and the reader is handed the interpretation before they can form one. Nothing is permitted to remain interior. Nothing is permitted to be interpreted. The reader is handed each symbol with its meaning already attached. This is not a technique failing under pressure. It is the technique. The result is a novel that substitutes inventory for interiority, and sensation for consequence. Characters do not develop under pressure. They absorb it, accumulate it, and eventually collapse beneath it. That is not characterisation. It is a weather report.

The violence is relentless, graphic, and almost entirely without metabolic function. The test of violence in literary fiction is not whether it is present but what it does — whether it changes pressure, reveals character, shifts the moral geometry of the book. Here it confirms what is already established on page one and then confirms it again, at greater length and higher volume, for the remainder of the novel. Each new atrocity arrives more detailed than the last, as though the author is working through a checklist of the reader's remaining tolerance. Trauma here is not something to be felt. It is something to be gawked at, arranged for maximum visible damage, held up to the light, and rotated slowly so nothing is missed. At a certain point the reader stops asking what the violence means and starts asking whether anyone involved paused to notice how this reads.

And then there is the paratext.

Before page one, Delaney informs the reader that this is "not a traditional romance novel" and is "primarily a tale of grief and sorrow and pain," and that "sometimes we are too broken for happily ever after." The Afterword confirms that the book was an "emotional journey" designed to "draw out many tears," and expresses hope that it worked on you too, "given that is its intended purpose." A writer hiding behind their own front and back matter is not being transparent. They are managing a verdict they suspect the text cannot survive on its own. If the book trusted its emotional logic, it would not need the preface to pre-authorise the grief or the afterword to confirm the machinery worked.

The author wants you to cry. This is stated. The apparatus required to produce that outcome is also stated. What is not stated, because the book cannot accommodate it, is why any of this should matter beyond the physiological response it is calibrated to produce.

The pulp origins are impossible to ignore. The tropes arrive in bulk: the innocent destroyed by corrupt authority, the reluctant exile in a desolate landscape, the soulmate declared in the wreckage, the sacrificial innocent, the villain's theatre of cruelty. Each is a fandom-derived fixture, imported wholesale from the "angst and comfort" tradition and deployed without friction or irony. The book is not using these tropes. It is being used by them. The effort to make them feel literary reads less like craft than like trying very hard in the wrong direction. The seams show precisely because the strain is so visible.

The representation of asexuality is where the failure becomes most consequential. A queer identity introduced as "inexplicable nonsense," experienced as shame, and never disentangled from trauma and self-loathing is not representation. It is the Tragic Queer trope with a different label. The implicit argument the structure makes about asexual life is not incidental. It is the shape of the story. That shape is an old and damaging one.

What would have earned five stars? Restraint. Trust. A willingness to let the interior life of a genuinely original protagonist breathe without reaching for the next catastrophe. The bones of something real are here — an asexual queer man navigating grief, isolation, and identity in a hostile landscape is a story worth telling. Told with discipline, with silence where silence is needed, with confidence that the reader does not require instruction on how to feel, this could have been a significant piece of queer fiction. Instead the author mistakes volume for weight, and exhaustion for catharsis.

The Lonely Road is sincere to the point of self-defeat — so committed to its protagonist's pain that it never steps back far enough to ask what shape that pain is making on the page. The grief is loud. The craft is absent. The overwhelming response is not sorrow. It is bafflement that this exists, and mild concern for anyone who finds it profound.

If this review interests you

The question of queer identity shaped entirely by its cost to the person who holds it runs through the Notes on Books archive. Édouard Louis handles the same territory with the discipline this book lacks; the review of The End of Eddy is the place to start. For the structural argument about substitution versus genuine formal intelligence, The Work of Repetition, the essay on Balle, Stuart, Han Kang, and Bazterrica, goes directly at what restraint actually looks like on the page.