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This was a reread, but it has been a few decades at least. Roadwork, pardon the pun, is like 30 miles of bad road. Our main protagonist (Bart) is a middle aged guy that basically starts to mentally break down; middle age crisis or more likely, some bad chemicals in the brain (as Kurt Vonnegut might say). Yet, Bart is not insane, not really. He just has had enough and thinks life has become pointless.

Bart's house and workplace (the Blue Ribbon Laundry for King fans!) are set to be demolished to make way for a new highway; the city has provided funds for relocation, but Bart resists this for no apparent reason. He refuses to close on a new site for the Laundry (he is in charge of the factory) and the owning corporation shuts it down, costing him his job and his wife. Throughout the text, Bart is flashing back to earlier days, thinking about his dead son (brain tumor) and relationship with this wife, all the while continuing down the bad road, with no stated rationale.

This has to be one of the bleakest novels I have read by King. I kept thinking of the Sex Pistols "God Save the Queen" while reading it, you know the lyrics "no future, no future, no future for you..." Beyond this, King's almost trademark character building shines through here, populating the book with some diverse and (at times hilarious) characters. This also evoked lots of 'nostalgia' for the early 70s energy crisis, but you really had to be around for that. I remember cruising around in my mom's tank of a station wagon looking for a station with gas (I think we were allowed to by gas on Mondays). Jimmy Carter's speech's later on about conservation... Gah! 4.5 bleak stars!!