Red River Road | Anna Downes (spoilers and ending explained)
This review contains spoilers for the big twist in Anna Downes’ Red River Road. If you are looking to stay spoiler-free, head back to the main review.
That is one long road on the cover and it may appear straight, but it is quite twisty in the book! This book really came out of left field. I don’t know what I expected, but I found it intriguing and deliciously strange with a shocking twist. But did I like the twist? Let’s chat about it.
What is Red River Road about?
One year ago free-spirited Phoebe Sweeney was living her best #vanlife, traveling up the Coral Coast in Western Australia and sharing her adventures on social media. Then, only three weeks into her journey, Phoebe vanished without a trace. Phoebe isn’t the first solo female traveler to vanish from this same area. Another woman named Vivi disappeared earlier this year in the same region. In the present, Phoebe’s sister Katy is retracing her route along the coastal highway, trying to find what happened to Phoebe.
Using Phoebe’s social media as a guide, Katy stops at each site Phoebe visited, talking to locals and looking for any clues that may have been overlooked. In particular, Katy is seeking out who Phoebe may have met along her travels and if one of them may know something. At one of the campsites, Katy meets a woman named Beth who is fleeing an abusive boyfriend. Battered, dirty, and bruised, Beth is not at all who she appears to be. She tells Katy her name is Lily and that she’s an American, but of course, she’s lying about everything–her past, her name, and her story.
Beth joins Katy on her search for answers. But the further they get along the trail Phoebe left behind, the more troubling things get. Someone is following Katy and Beth. Was Phoebe being followed as well?
Who are the other two narrators?
In addition to Katy, there are chapters narrated by Beth (this is quite confusing as Katy still refers to her as “Lily” in her own chapters) and a man named Wyatt. “Lily” (Beth) claims to be on the run from a man named Lucas Cleary, who she says was her boyfriend (and her abuser). Interesting that early on a “Lucas” also appears in the past in Wyatt’s chapters, so we know that our third narrator and Beth are connected in some way. These narrators leave holes in their backstories that a truck could drive through!
Lucas and Beth were actually grifters. They’d go around to different campsites and steal from the travelers staying there. Lucas did turn abusive and Beth really is on the run. Still, she’s lying to Katy and that made me so suspicious of her. Was she lying because of the abuse, or does she know more than she lets on?
Wyatt’s story is troubling from his first chapter, when he describes memories at home with his dad and his brother Lucas. Wyatt’s mother left but then Lucas tells him that about a month after she left them, she also disappeared. Strange… Wyatt has memories of hearing strange thumping noises coming from the other room. Lucas claims the sounds are from an animal, but we should all be skeptical of that. Wyatt is a decade younger than Lucas, so I often felt that his child brain may not have picked up on everything going on. This makes Wyatt unreliable in his own way. In the present, Wyatt is fifteen living with his dad (who seems to go to the shed a lot…) and Lucas has left home to go live van life. Of course, we know from Beth exactly what Lucas has been up to. Or do we? These aren’t the most reliable narrators…
What is the twist?
Just before the big reveal, Beth gets a call from her friend Jesse who tells her that he looked into Phoebe and discovered she didn’t go missing a year prior as Katy said… she went missing about four weeks earlier. Beth doesn’t know why Katy lied, but she does know that around the time of Phoebe’s disappearance, Lucas also disappeared for about a day before reappearing. Jesse also reveals that Phoebe’s family has been looking for her, but they only have one daughter. Beth goes through Katy’s van and finds a journal and hair that belong to Phoebe. Yikes! Who is Katy and why has she lied? (Not that Beth can talk, she also lied about her identity…)
I don’t know how to say this in a less shocking way… Katy and Phoebe are the same person. Only Katy isn’t aware of this and thinks Phoebe is her sister. She has no memory for most of the book that she’s in a fugue state. The reader can pick up that Katy/Phoebe has dissociated from something. Now, she is following her own breadcrumbs trying to piece together what happened. After a pretty intense climactic scene with Lucas, Katy crashes and then wakes up in the hospital is Phoebe. She sees people on the news speaking about her, but she has no memory of them. They mention a friend she was with named Lily, but she has no memory of her either.
It turns out Katy and Beth had gotten to Lucas and Wyatt’s hometown. Beth had realized Lucas was involved in Phoebe’s disappearance because she saw messages from him on Phoebe’s Instagram account. Only it wasn’t Lucas messaging Phoebe, it was Wyatt pretending to be Lucas. He invited her over to his dad’s house, but hid when she arrived. Later, he reveals that he had set up a camera at the house to record the strange noises, which at this point he thought were ghosts. Instead, he captured what really happened between his father and Phoebe.
In Wyatt’s recording, it’s clear that his father thought Phoebe was his wife. He calls her “Nova” and then flies into a rage, beating her severely before carrying her body to the shed. We later learn that he has killed a number of women, in addition to his wife, Nova.
What did I think?
This was such a bizarre and fascinating twist, I can’t help but enjoy it. I can see it being polarizing for many readers who wanted a different ending to Katy’s search. Despite how confusing these multiple identity stories can be (and I don’t only mean Katy and Phoebe, I also mean Beth and Lily), Downes executed this to perfection. Looking back, there were plenty of clues that Katy was really Phoebe, but they were subtle enough that I doubt most readers will put them together and guess the ending.
I could write a novel about the implications of this story for gendered violence, mental health, and trauma. I won’t though! Downes handles these topics with care and without much overt commentary. The power of her message came through the story itself. One thing that I don’t think all readers will agree with is Wyatt seeing his father’s mental illness and how that contributed to the murders he committed. “He became a different person,” Wyatt muses. This could be read as letting his father off the hook. I didn’t take it that way, though. Told from Wyatt’s perspective, this was him making sense of a father and a brother who let him down and a mother who was taken from him unfairly. Downes has a focus on mental healing and processing trauma, and that came through with Phoebe, Beth, and Wyatt.
I’m curious to go read some other reviews to see how this twist went over. It’s memorable, if nothing else! I enjoyed it, but of course I am now (officially) a PhD in psychology so perhaps I’ll always favor a novel that puts the psychology in psychological thriller.
Well I need a cold drink and to go outside after this one. That was intense! Until next time, spoiler crew…
