It has been ages since I have not been able to turn off my light before going to bed. In fact, I don’t believe there has ever been a time when I felt so unsure about the world and its possibilities (even its limitless potential has been unable to halt me from communing Morpheous), until I read this story. I have never been so completely scared. I laugh at the Exorcist, and yet something as simple as a painting has the complete power over me.

King does a superb job of making us see what he wants us to see. So well does he do this that we can look at the paintings hanging in our own homes and start to wonder, “What if?” We are helpless in his world, the world he “created” of a horror author and his own final complete meltdown and erasure of the line he has so carefully drawn between his world and the world in which he creates. He becomes his own character, and he makes us a character of his story as well. We see a merging of his world, his creation and our own worlds. That is what scared me most; that all that separates his world from ours and The Road Virus’ is the separate births of art; humanity, visual art and literature.

The Road Virus is that nightmare that somewhere out there, there is something coming to get us. Life is coming to get us, however long it takes, it eventually will. Everything is connected. In the story our fictitious author shows the painting to his aunt, a painting which will eventually kill her. Something so insignificant as selling a painting, buying a painting and just viewing a painting seals the characters’ fate.

Doesn’t that happen in the real world? Aren’t we eventually bitten in the end by that devil that has been chasing us? Cancer seems the most obvious. Those who die of cancer did something to bring it on – whether it is smoking or not getting checked regularly. Drunk driving, while the victim is going on his or her merry sober way they have no idea that somewhere out there, there is someone getting toasted who will kill them; the driver takes his first drink and the count down has begun. Even death of old age is its own destroyer; as it is that long life that will eventually be one’s undoing.

That is what is most unsettling about this story. We encounter similar situations everyday. The only difference is that in each of us, it is different. After analysis, this story reminds me much of The Five People You Meet in Heaven, about a man coming to terms with his own fate and the fate of others in which he played a part. A little boy runs into the middle of a street after his ball, and almost gets hit by a car. The driver, so shaken eventually meets fate shortly after, all because of a near miss. I congratulate Mr. King for putting life into perspective, through a ridiculous and terrifying tale.