Propelled by her mother’s death into a half-life of drug-dealing boyfriends and shivery mornings, Meaghan Garvey finds salvation in dingy dive bars—and in being the stranger who is always moving on to somewhere else. When chance gifts her with a Cadillac with a blood-red paint-job and matching leather seats, Garvey sets out on an amphetamine-fueled road-trip through her native Midwest in the hopes of resolving the mysteries of her itinerant personal life through encounters with the places and characters that define her imagination: Water demons, lake camps; haunted houses; ship-wrecks; Truckers on speed; roadside waitresses; wise-cracking barflies and Jeffrey Epstein's personal exterminator. Part coming-of-age memoir and part 1940s film noir jail-break, Midwestern Death Trip combines the thrill of the open road amid a haunted landscape of back-woods diners and small-town bar tops. A speed demon’s encounter with the depths of American loneliness from the Hunter Thompson of the 2020s.

Meaghan Garvey

Meaghan Garvey is a writer from Chicago. Midwestern Death Trip is her first book