Welcome to the homepage for "Douglas Welcomes Careful Drivers", the forthcoming novel from Christopher Daniels. Christopher is a recent Honors graduate of the University in Western Sydney, Australia. His interests include postmodernism, 1980s popular culture, and writing for fun and -- hopefully -- profit. Christopher has been writing for several years in the short story vein, notably with his Sydney Morning Herald Young Writers award commended story, entitled "I Never Was a Citizen Kane". "Douglas Welcomes Careful Drivers" is his first novel.
Andy, Alex and Todd are three friends who have grown up together in the small southern California town of Douglas. Told as a first-person narrative through Andy, Douglas Welcomes Careful Drivers relates the final turbulent summer the characters will spend together.
Concept:
The fictional town of Douglas is situated several miles north of Barstow, off Interstate Fifteen, in southern California. Douglas was founded here, on the cusp of the Mojave Desert, to serve as home for the people who built and worked at Reggie Realm, a Disney-esque theme park designed in the 1950s by cartoon creator Reginald Douglas, after whom the town is named.
Douglas is home to the descendants of the original builders and employees of the theme park. Andy, Alex and Todd are three friends, third-generation Douglas residents, who see the town as holding no options for their futures. They want to avoid being tied down to their hometown, in dead-end jobs at Reggie Realm or at Miracle Mall in downtown Douglas. Andy, Alex and Todd escape to Los Angeles, get a college education and soon after find themselves trapped back in the town they were so desperate to leave, only to find that nothing has changed for them.
Only to find that the most drastic changes are yet to come.
Douglas Welcomes Careful Drivers is not a coming-of-age story in the usual American pop-culture sense; that well-worn cliché of high school friends having a final blowout before going away to college and entering the real world and everything changing. Douglas Welcomes Careful Drivers is a narrative in media res. These characters have been taking part in their own long-running soap opera: Their lives. When we meet our protagonist Andy, he and his friends have been back in Douglas for a year, their college educations meaningless as they labour six days a week inside seven-foot cartoon animal costumes at the Reggie Realm theme park.
Summer is just about to begin, and it will be life-changing for Andy, for Alex, for Todd. There is a karmic rush wherein, after their dull and unchanging twenty-something years of existence, the dam breaks and over the course of the summer they will each have to seriously re-evaluate their lives as, one by one, they witness disaster and experience the deep personal loss of a loved one. In this way, the novel discusses the notion of self-improvement as something of a fallacy, that it often times takes an extreme experience to jolt us out of our own complacency.
This isn’t self-help. This is the help of others. This is taking the hand of a loved one. This is saying hello. Sometimes, this is saying goodbye.
In Douglas Welcomes Careful Drivers, concepts of salvation and redemption lie not in the protagonists trying to work out who they could be, but embracing who they are as the ultimate means of making sense of their lives.
