
A brand new collection of original dark fiction concerning itself with people, cars, and the open road. In the novella The Ballad of Road Mama and Daddy Bliss, a man assigned community service duty with the city morgue after a DUI arrest is offered a simple transport an old woman's body back to her hometown, and his record will be wiped clean. But this is no typical old woman, and—as he soon discovers—he is taking her to a town that is on no map. The old woman's identity, as well as the reasons behind the town's secret existence, will be revealed to him over the course of a few nightmarish hours between midnight and dawn—the time when The Road demands its sacrifices. In Congestion, a man who has hated cars all his life finds himself stuck in a traffic jam on a sweltering hot day...a very different type of traffic jam. In Merge Right, a businessman on a long road trip comes to a long and lonely stretch of highway where every sign he passes orders him to MERGE RIGHT. There are no exits in sight, no other cars, no sign of civilization...and there is something very strange about the scenes appearing in his rearview mirror.
Author

Gary A. Braunbeck is a prolific author who writes mysteries, thrillers, science fiction, fantasy, horror, and mainstream literature. He is the author of 19 books; his fiction has been translated into Japanese, French, Italian, Russian and German. Nearly 200 of his short stories have appeared in various publications. His fiction has received several awards, including the Bram Stoker Award in 2003 for "Duty" and in 2005 for "We Now Pause for Station Identification"; his book Destinations Unknown won a Stoker in 2006. His novella "Kiss of the Mudman" received the International Horror Guild Award in 2005."