I just reviewed this myself:

This is a beautifully written piece of work. Some of the lines are stunning: the description of the road as 'A beige ribbon of time' was lovely, as was 'thirsty little towns' for the settlements along its route. The wordiness has a languid, slightly oppressive quality that seems to reflect the heat of the Karoo itself. Very impressive.

Once or twice I noticed repetitions that you might want to look at, For instance, not long after the 'beige ribbon' line you have a 'crucified black ribbon' and the strength of the image is diluted. Similarly: 'hellish heat of midday' is too similar to 'white heat of the afternoon'.

You have a habit of turning sentences into digressive lists, which, while emphasising the slowness of the hot atmosphere, can be interpreted as padding. For instance: 'They haven’t made enough movies about it, like Easy Rider and Vanishing Point and Duel and I think, Bagdad Café and the one with Sissy Spasek and Martin Sheen – Paris Texas was it?' Do you need to name all these movies? And, for that matter, do you need to compare Dirk to Clint Eastwood? Your language is surely good enough to describe him without using such a shortcut? And the Radiohead and Queens of the Stone Age references were lost on my old ears.

I loved the use of colour in the descriptions, and, although the stuff about burying souls and the beautiful young boys left me cold, I could detect a sense of mournful truthfulness here, and put my own prejudices to one side.

What else? 'common old garden' should surely be 'common or garden', and 'dropped to the floor like a dripping dead skin' would be better if 'dropped' and 'dripping' weren't colliding slightly. And although the elegaic quality of the ending was impressive, I felt that it didn't connect enough to the beginning. In fact, it read like 4 different scenes had been stitched together: the long, loving introduction to the Karoo; the afternoons spent making love to Dirk; the attack; the boys driving to the spa in Hermie's Mustang. The parts didn't seem to add up to a whole - although, having said that, it had the disconcerting effect of half-gathered memories.

Anyway, enough niggles. this deserves plenty of praise, and I have scored all 5s, except 4 for pacing as I think with a little work you can improve the flow of this.