On an evening like any other, a mysterious woman moves into room Four-One-Three of an apartment building in a new city with the firm determination to start a fresh life here. Running away from a horrible past, she seeks the solace and peace she hopes to find through isolation, loneliness, and a self-imposed clean slate.
However, despite her best efforts, she soon finds herself surrounded by kind and good people, people who genuinely care about her. Her co-workers at the local diner. The man who lives downstairs. His young and ever-cheerful daughter. People who want to be let into her life, people who might need her protection from a cruel and uncaring world…
Quiet, deadly, and haunted by a violent past, she quickly finds herself pulled between the desire to connect with another human being and the desire to fall back into her darker side…even as fate begins to set in motion a series of events that will lead to a cataclysmic encounter with a familiar and vengeful figure, someone she wished she could forever forget…
“She Pulls Off the Interstate” is a thematically-driven novel that tackles the complex concepts of who are our heroes, who are our villains, and who are the ones hovering over the space in-between. Through its easy-to-read text and cynically-laced voice, the novel pushes its readers to ask themselves dark questions on the subjects of redemption, escape, family, and human nature, while all along whispering hints of even darker answers. Slow to start and disturbingly violent to the end, this first book by Eugene Ahn finds itself at once both standing on familiar ground and unafraid to spill fresh blood all over it. With a female protagonist in place of the traditional male role and enough twists throughout the plot to keep the readers on the sharpest edge of their minds, “She Pulls Off the Interstate” sets itself to the simple task of entertaining its audience while at the same time aspiring to the higher goal of making the same audience think long after the last words are read.
