‘The prospect of manhood’
The Passenger Seat
by Vijay Khurana
Windsor: Biblioasis, 2025
$22.95 / 9781771966306
Reviewed by Ryan Frawley
*
Why is always more interesting than how. The details of a murder amount, in the end, to an assemblage of more or less gruesome facts. A broken-down van with a flooded engine by the side of the road; two unlucky tourists; two troubled young men with a newly-purchased SKS rifle.
These are the details of the 2019 Northern British Columbia killings, an apparently senseless murder spree by two Port Alberni men who killed three people and sparked a manhunt across the vast emptiness of the North that attracted attention from around the world.
The how is easily told; the why is harder to understand. There was no prior connection between the victims and the perpetrators. The young men never faced a trial, instead dispatching themselves after filming a video confession that gave no motive behind the crime.
The same mystery haunts the heart of the debut novel of Berlin- and London-based Vijay Khurana’s The Passenger Seat. Inspired, if that’s the right word, in part by the real-life murders, the novel places us into the fraught dynamic between two adolescent friends, Adam and Teddy. Products of broken or breaking homes, what Teddy and Adam find in each other is never entirely clear. The short chapters of the book alternate between the two men’s points of view so that we see them both from the inside and from without, but in Khurana’s spare, rhythmic prose, nothing is handed to us.
“There is something in Adam that makes Teddy want to stick around, just to see what will happen,” we learn early on. And certainly, Adam, seen from the outside, is the more outwardly disturbed of the pair. The son of an unemployed father with “a messy comb-over the color of come” and a mother he will never see again, Adam has a reputation at the boy’s school for being—to put it mildly—a bit of a weirdo. He reads books and watches YouTube videos produced by the “bearded guys he subscribes to”; the coterie of ‘manosphere’ misogynists and racists and hacks that lie in wait for young men just like him, searching with not a little desperation for a place in a world that is at best indifferent to them, at worst downright hostile.
Teddy doesn’t drive; Adam does. What’s more, Adam owns a camper truck, and the two of them decide to break free from their empty lives of drinking and video games and porn. They head north. Adam wants to reach the Arctic Coast, “having gone as far as anyone can go.” Teddy, meanwhile, “is not thrilled by the prospect of manhood, but he has not yet settled on an alternative.”
Adam drives while Teddy sits in the passenger seat, but who is really steering this story? Adam’s views on women and multiculturalism and society in general mirror those of the real-life killers, obsessed with Hitler, Putin, and Trump, but it’s Teddy who makes the decision to buy an SKS rifle at the start of the journey.
The jagged edges of a species of male friendship are powerfully rendered as Teddy sits in the passenger seat beside Adam, “between them a bolt ready to be slid home.” They talk and joke and fight. They compete with another, unspoken games of hopping from one fencepost to another or kicking orange peels into a bog taking the place of direct confrontation. On one of their breaks for private masturbation—another unspoken, unacknowledged need—Adam thinks of Teddy’s sister Grace, because “thinking about Grace is just another way to fuck with Teddy.” But Adam, we are jarringly told, will die a virgin.
“Two boys, or men”: the phrase is repeated like a refrain throughout the novel. Grown into dangerous bodies, confronted with “matters in which they are powerless and therefore blameless,” neither Teddy nor Adam has any firm direction. And when they find a young couple broken down at the side of the road, Adam’s only goal is to “fuck with them.”
Adam may be the more obviously troubled of the two boys, but Teddy, despite his position as the eternal passenger, is not passive. For these two young men, like all young men, their lives are mediated through the way they appear to others, through status and struggles for dominance. We see them, in one of the book’s few breaks from the point of view of either Teddy or Adam, in the security camera of the store where they buy the fateful gun. Outsiders, looking in, just as the pair experience the vast open spaces of northern BC in the cramped quarters of a camper van, peering through the windshield. Just as the world’s media follows the case from a remove, gathering up every grim detail without ever getting closer to that crucial question of why?
Just as we, as readers, sit on our side of the glass, protected by the distance fiction gives us while the boys or men slowly, steadily, run out of road.
Adam thinks of killing a lot. He’s not so much thirsty for blood as he is for power, “like what the guys in porn must feel when the girl goes crazy… But why should we have been made that way… with morality crusted on top like a hasty paint job, and the truth seething below?”
Adam’s warped, Internet-infected view of the world is as repugnant as it ought to be, but Khurana never once takes the easy way out by making his protagonists into monsters. Nor are they victims, compelled by past trauma to do what they did. “A broken boy cannot teach us anything about ourselves, they will think,” Adam considers when he imagines the media coverage of what they have done, again seeing himself through eyes other than his own, weighing his value against the world he will never find a comfortable place in, a world that maybe never had a place to offer him.
The Passenger Seat is a short book, really more of a novella than a novel, and its tiny chapters and brief scenes move quickly along. Even without knowing anything about the real-life murders that inspired the story, there’s only one way things can end for boys like this. But it’s how we get there, and the questions that go unanswered as we sit right there in the passenger seat with Teddy, that give the book its force.
There is no one to excuse, no one to blame. What there is instead is bodies by the roadside and that aching question of why, sharpened against Khurana’s stark prose that makes no attempt to answer. We are left to do that for ourselves, if we can, guessing at what these broken boys can teach us about ourselves. The view from this passenger seat turns out to be anything but passive.
*
Ryan Frawley is a novelist and essayist whose short fiction has won numerous awards in BC and across Canada. He is the author of a novel, Scar, and a travel writing collection, Towers Temples Palaces: Essays from Europe. He also writes essays on medium.com and can be contacted at ryanfrawley.com. [Editor’s note: Ryan previously reviewed Cynthia LeBrun in BCR.]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
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