The book is billed as a first novel, though it is less an extended plot with interwoven subplots, than a collection of stories with sex, love, desire, and corruption craftily knitting seemingly diverse yet equal characters together, until each is firmly isolated in their own, unique pocket. Rogal has a romantic, sexually curious and skewed sense of humour. He imagines a pair of gay hit-men reuniting for one last blast as middle-aged relief from the concerns of family and career. He puts them on the road with a mother, an idiot savant child and the cross-dresser who may be stalking them. Then he threads their lives through a motel court outside Magog, Quebec.

Magog is a border town, en-route from Maine or Boston to Toronto, where people are pretty much the same, give or take. But Magog is also the oldest part of Canada and it sounds a bit strange, like the Indian name for a monster resting in the muck at the bottom of a frozen northern lake. Rogal uses devices familiar both sides of the border: gun and illicit sex play. Yet somehow the pattern that emerges north of the line is slightly different. The usual number of sleeves and holes, but an awkward fit nevertheless.

The Long Drive Home is a fun and revealing shoot-em-up. Well known as a poet, playwright and author of short stories, Rogal has a good ear for dialogue and an appreciation for the vagaries of human behaviour. Listen to the couple operating the motel as they find blood on a piece of broken glass while cleaning a trashed room:
"Still think we shouldn't switch to plastic?"
"You think it's the fault of the glass, someone wants
to cut someone else?"
"I was thinking more, an accident."
"Hm. You know I don't believe in such things as
accidents. The script has been written."
"Amen."

Suited up, Rogal's people are as familiar as Sunday meeting: interior decorators, donut-shop managers, private detectives and small-time construction contractors. We've just never seen them in their underwear before.