No Exit

“‘Screw you, Bing Crosby […]’ It was official: he’d be getting his white Christmas. He could shut up about it now.”

Darby’s anger at the cheerful Christmas song “White Christmas” in the novel’s first chapter establishes her poor mood as she hurries back to Utah due to her mother’s fatal illness. Additionally, the novel’s opening rejection of the charm of a white Christmas establishes the snow as an obstacle in the text.

“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.