FICTION: Wolf Point By Edward Falco

BY DOUG CHILDERS

SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT

Oct 9, 2005

234 pages, Unbridled Books, $23.95

"Wolf Point," written by Virginia Tech professor Edward Falco, opens like it's going to be one of those fast-paced, consciously no-frills thrillers that have more in common with Hollywood than literary novels. You know the ones: minimal set-up, quick plot hook and nonstop action with nice twists. Think of the films "Panic Room" and "Cellular," and you're in the right ballpark.

Tom "T" Walker, a wealthy, 57-year-old man, is driving his new Land Rover north from Salem, Va., when he stumbles onto a pair of hitchhikers dressed up like they're extras in a Quentin Tarantino film -- or maybe something by David Lynch.

The woman -- "somewhere between eighteen and twenty-one" -- is wearing "red leather pants over black boots and a white silk blouse opened three buttons down, with blond hair flying out from her head wild and wind blown and radiant." The man, who is a little older, is "long-haired, black-leather-jacket-clad," and he leans "back into the roadside foliage as if hoping he wouldn't be noticed."

Naturally, despite his (and our) misgivings, Walker picks them up and discovers, after thwarting their plan to rob him, that they're on the run from a thug they ripped off in a botched drug deal.

As these plot points bob deliciously to the surface, readers fond of stripped-down thrill rides through a dark, Gothic world will settle happily into their reading chairs.

But as lean as it is, "Wolf Point" is up to something more complicated. On a deeper level (and true representatives of the no-frills thriller proudly have no deeper level), it is about the knowability of the self. Whether we can ever know ourselves or -- perhaps more troubling -- ever really know others.

The first misgivings about identity pop up as the woman's accent slips away from its Southern lilt and her grammar grows subtly more formal. But rather than settling solidly into their "real" personas, the hitchhikers morph from one ephemeral character to another, and as they do, Falco lets Walker slip into a series of musings and flashbacks that suggest that Walker isn't exactly who we might initially have thought he was, either.

Readers looking for a simple, fast read may be a little disappointed with Falco's philosophical turn, but the narrative never slows down (even if it doesn't offer much gunplay and doesn't contain a single car chase). It's a cunning exercise that playfully thwarts its readers' expectations, and it should measure up nicely against your best efforts to think a few pages ahead of Falco.

  Doug Childers, a Richmond writer, edits WAG, a literary Web site at www.thewag.net.