The Passenger Seat
Vijay Khurana
ISBN 9781761153792
Reviewed by NINA CULLEY
Masculinity and Isolation in Vikay Khurana’s The Passengers’ Seat
In the summer of 2019, two teenagers drove across British Columbia, leaving behind a strange scene: a cryptic goodbye message, a torched pick-up truck, McDonald’s French fries and cans of Red Bull scattered across the crime scene. What followed was one of the largest manhunts in Canadian history—yet the motive remained unclear. This real-life mystery, laced with the sometimes-dangerous dimensions of modern masculinity, became the inspiration for Vijay Khurana’s The Passengers’ Seat, shortlisted for The Novel Prize.
I signed up for one of Khurana’s author talks in London earlier this year and came away with the sense that The Passengers’ Seat was a work long in the making. Having written many short stories on male friendship—a subject not often explored in contemporary literary conversation, despite the wide discourse on modern masculinity—Khurana brings a depth to this novel that belies its thin spine. The story opens with two bored, discontented teenagers—Teddy and Adam—bumming around their small town on Canada’s west coast. At times they are referred to as ‘boys,’ at others as ‘men.’ The perspective shifts between them, with occasional turns into retrospective narration that lend the novel an air of inevitability and dread—two boys or men walking out of the gun store, two men who will never return home.
Teddy is the more socially acceptable of the two: clear-skinned, with a girlfriend and a family that appears stable—aside from his mother’s affair and his father’s denial of the fact. He is introspective, passive at times, carrying the aura of someone waiting for something—anything—to happen. Adam, by contrast, is the archetypal contemporary outcast: less sexually experienced, contemptuous of his father and disconnected from his mother. Yet it is Adam who gives Teddy a sense of direction, however destructive—a road trip north.
Immediately after leaving town, the boys purchase a rifle—which almost becomes a third character—cheap sunglasses, black duct tape, and camping gear. Teddy is the only one licensed to carry a firearm and the only one who knows how to shoot, yet Adam exhibits an overt fascination with violence, frequently referencing first-person-shooter games like Patriot (an addition that may have felt over the top if had not aligned with the original case). This contrast of skill and temperament is the first time the novel makes the central question explicit: who is in the passenger’s seat, and who is driving?
At first glance, Adam—volatile, cruel, and literally at the wheel—seems to be in charge. He maps out their plan and pays for groceries. But Teddy holds his own advantages—he has more social capital and is dangerously impulsive. They’re friends, kind of – and Khurana captures this through their voices. They speak like teenagers, telling each other to ‘fuck off,’ shutting down emotions, and playing games at one another’s expense. In one scene, Adam drives steadily so Teddy can sleep, only to jolt the car moments later. Their relationship is marked by this oscillation of dominance and submission, the ebb and flow of resentment, tenderness (sometimes homoerotic), and constant one-upmanship. Their inability to establish a safe friendship is a fact lingers reflecting a wider cultural discourse. As Sam Graham-Felsen observes in Where Have All My Deep Male Friendships Gone?, ‘the notion that men […] suck at friendship is so widespread that it has become a truism, and a punchline.’
The novel escalates when the boys encounter a couple playing cards by the roadside. What begins as a minor interaction, spirals into a tense, almost surreal sequence that makes returning home impossible. Within the context of Teddy and Adam’s relationship, the outcome feels less surprising—a distinction Khurana has noted: ‘I was really trying to work in the space in between what’s sudden and unexpected, and what’s so inevitable that it’s almost already happened before it happens on the page,’ he remarked in an interview with Kill Your Darlings (1).
Afterwards, they keep driving, but the setting presses heavily around them. A muddied farm river, the dusty heat, swarming insects, and the endless, uninspiring wilderness create a sticky claustrophobia. They camp roughly and bathe with an old bottle of sour water. Despite the apparent freedom of the open road, they are trapped—not just by the car, their dwindling supplies, and the oppressive landscape, but by one another.
The climax of The Passengers’ Seat occurs ‘off-screen,’ revealed through an extended coda that follows minor characters—Teddy’s mother’s lover, Ron. This structural choice is one of Khurana’s sharpest: Ron’s relationship with his best friend, Freeman, mirrors the dynamics of Teddy and Adam. On the surface, Ron and Freeman could pass as decent, ordinary men—enjoying a beer at the pub, keeping fit, talking about nothing in particular. They are not overtly violent, though it is implied that Freeman is abusive toward his wife, a fact Ron avoids acknowledging. Yet, like Teddy and Adam, they struggle with normative male alexithymia (NMA)—a term coined as early as the 90s to describe men’s difficulty expressing emotions, a result of being socialised to appear tough and stoic. (2)
Viewed through the lens of these men, Khurana’s women stand out in sharp relief. They navigate encounters with caution: Adam attempts to intimidate a young woman at a convenience store, while two women at a bar instinctively avoid passing Ron. Whether the men are teenage boys or seemingly respectable middle-aged ‘good guys,’ women respond with suspicion.
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There is an almost instinctual urge to categorise perpetrators as traumatised, brainwashed, or psychopathic—to make sense of the senseless. This impulse to assign blame saturates headlines, social media, and the relentless churn of sensationalised violence. It would be easy, then, to dismiss the novel as merely a depiction of male violence: to tick off the familiar hallmarks—guns, aggression, competitiveness—and move on. But Khurana makes such neat explanations impossible. Violence, in his novel, is never the product of a single trait, hobby, or cultural artifact. Teddy acts violently not simply because Adam influences him; Adam acts violently not solely because he plays first-person-shooter games or resents women. Instead, it emerges from something far murkier—and therefore all the more frightening.
Though Khurana was not explicitly drawing on contemporary figures, it is hard not to think of personalities like Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, or Elon Musk. Adam’s fixation on ‘the book’—a handbook that recalls the digital manuals circulating the manosphere, from Tate’s Hustler’s University (now The Real World) to Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life. These programs promise structure, affirmation, and power; what they often deliver is a seductive mythology for boys searching for direction. In an interview with Liminal (3), Khurana reflected on ‘the way men often create or adopt narratives that may seem comforting but end up being harmful […] especially when those narratives encourage them to think of themselves as tragic heroes or victims of injustice.’ In the novel, Adam considers ditching Teddy before reconsidering: ‘but then he and Teddy would have stories, not a single one for them to share. And a story is what he needs,’ (p.113). The ‘direction’ Adam – and perhaps Teddy – seek is less about goals or practical guidance than a naïve, teenage longing for a narrative to inhabit—a story in which they might discover belonging, identity, or purpose. Later Adam states, ‘he imagines himself entering the ranks of men who are despised, remembered,’ (p.168).
It is precisely why, for all its violence and posturing, the novel’s most persistent theme seems to be loneliness. Each character is isolated, even in the presence of others: Teddy cannot trust Adam, Adam cannot admit his insecurities, and Ron and Freeman cannot speak honestly to one another. The landscape parallels this paradox of freedom and confinement. Everyone the boys encounter along the way seems similarly cut off—the spacy woman at the gas station, the middle-aged man traveling alone with his video camera. The novel closes with Ron in his kayak: ‘He looks at the ruin, then again at the birds. He is glad to be ignored by them. It is the same thing as acceptance,’ (p.244). As with authors like Cormac McCarthy or T.S. Eliot, whose landscapes convey both loneliness and disregard, Khurana’s wilderness reflects something tragic about his men. Unable to express intimacy directly, they claw for attention and seek solace in indirect forms of connection.
The Passengers’ Seat is not the easiest of reads. None of its characters are particularly likable; the book is moody, macabre, and unflinching. Yet it is also engrossing—confronting in the way memorable novels must be—and it leaves the reader with something to mull over: who, after all, was really in the passenger’s seat? The boy at the wheel, the boy beside him, or the culture that shaped them both? As with the real-life events that inspired the story, the answer remains hazy.
Cited
1. https://www.killyourdarlings.com.au/article/debut-spotlight-5-questions-with-vijay-khurana/
2. https://time.com/6694925/men-friendship-complicated-essay/
3. https://www.liminalmag.com/5-questions/vijay-khurana
NINA CULLEY is a Thai-Welsh writer and critic based in Naarm. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Kill Your Darlings, Liminal, Aniko Press, Mascara Review, and more. As a theatre, arts, and literary critic, her work is regularly published in Time Out, Limelight, and ArtsHub. In 2024, she was named one of Mascara’s Emerging Critics, and she is a 2025 Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellow. Nina previously worked as Editorial Assistant at Kill Your Darlings.