Lucky Ride

by Terry Tierney

Overview

When Flash's friend Rick shows up in Binghamton, New York, with an interstate weed delivery, he jumps at the chance to escape his wife Ronnie's affair with her middle-aged boss. On the speed-fueled drive to Fort Worth, Flash dodges a highway stalker and recalls his military service on Adak, a desolate cold war outpost where Seabees bravely defended their country with marijuana and LSD. Hitchhiking west from Fort Worth, Flash confronts Texas Rangers, amorous witches, armed felons, and good Samaritans, all offering advice and misdirection. But his dreams of starting fresh in California recede like a spent wave, his money gone and no chance of a job. Ronnie offers reconciliation and Flash must decide how much he still trusts the seductive pull of the irresistible campus radical he married before the draft descended on their lives.

Set in the Vietnam War era, LUCKY RIDE tells the story of a recent veteran, an unraveling marriage, and a hitchhiking trip steeped in hippie optimism, post-war skepticism, and drug-induced fantasy.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940165736667
Publisher:	Unsolicited Press
Publication date:	12/31/2021
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
File size:	297 KB

About the Author

Terry Tierney is a writer who hails from the Midwest, but has planted roots in the San Francisco Bay Area. After serving in the Seabees, he completed his BA and MA at Binghamton University, and completed a PhD in Victorian Literature at Emory University. He taught college composition and creative writing courses, and survived several Silicon Valley startups as a software engineer. He lives in Oakland with his wife, Michaelyn Burnette, a Librarian from the University of California, their two Persian cats, and their enthusiastic Golden Retriever. Tierney's work has appeared in countless publications. His poetry collection, The Poet's Garage, was published in May 2020 by Unsolicited Press. More can be learned at http: //terrytierney.com.

Editorial Reviews

Terry Tierney, the poet who gave us beautiful, sad, human portraits of life in America in his debut collection, The Poet's Garage, now offers up a novel that leaps at us like an anaconda prose poem, fully charged and rolled up tight and ready to inhale. Lucky Ride is a bang-zoom road trip novel with the queasy high-flying pace of Easy Rider and the breakneck prose of On the Road. As both poet and novelist, Terry Tierney gives us the goods in this full-blast, rollicking adventure with style and language as rich and vivid as the countryside. Lucky Ride is good old fashioned American lyricism, so if you're in need of a "brief camaraderie of souls on the road in the middle of nowhere," here's your ticket, enjoy the ride.

Douglas Cole, author of the acclaimed novel The White Field and six poetry collections

With Lucky Ride, Terry Tierney has written a classic road novel that captures the spirit of the late sixties the way Kerouac did with the fifties. The protagonist Flash smokes his way across the country, meeting a cast of bizarre characters, as well as friends, most of whom are fellow veterans of the Seabees who were stationed in Alaska during Vietnam. We feel for him as he rolls from adventure to adventure and tries to figure out his life after his wife's betrayal. Tierney has crafted an epic story of loss and redemption.

Henry Hitz, author of Squirrels in the Wall: A Novel in Stories

From the Publisher