Destinations Unknown [Hardcover]

Gary A. Braunbeck (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 30, 2006

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 deal: 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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The open road is a malleable metaphor pregnant with dark and dangerous possibilities in this uneven trilogy of tales from Stoker-winner Braunbeck (Home Before Dark). "The Ballad of Road Mama and Daddy Bliss" is an outré first-person account of a DWI offender who travels to a bizarre subworld where traffic fatalities are reconstructed from remnants of junked cars. In "Congestions," a harried driver trapped in a traffic jam unravels psychologically as he witnesses a parade of surreal images outside his car that may just be projections of his own crumbling mind. Though original in conception, each of these stories suffers from a glut of details disproportionate to their slim plots. By contrast, "Merge Right" is a taut piece of Twilight Zone–style paranoia, featuring a man whose nighttime mission to take his dead wife's ashes to a final resting place grows creepier by the mile. At the very least, this collection reinforces Braunbeck's reputation as one of the more inventive contemporary writers cultivating the dark fantasy terrain. (June)
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Review

...this collection reinforces Braunbeck's reputation as one of the more inventive contemporary writers cultivating the dark fantasy terrain. --Publishers Weekly

The road will never be the same following Gary Braunbeck's suspense filled horror novella (The Ballad of Road Mama and Daddy Bliss) and two psychological ghostly shorts. All three tales keeps the audience reading while wondering what is really going on. At the final destination, fans will simply know the next signpost has to be in the Twilight Zone as Mr. Braunbeck provides three thrillers that Rod Serling would have appreciated. --Reviewcentre.com

Anyone who's ever suffered through a traffic jam or experienced the mixture of exhilaration and exhaustion that comes with a long road trip will be able to appreciate the love/hate relationship the characters herein have with their vehicles. 'The Ballad of Road Mama and Daddy Bliss' is the standout of the book... The narrator's voice is engaging, the servants of the highway gods are creepy as hell and satisfyingly complex, and the plot ticks along like a well-tuned engine. --Locus

Product Details

• Hardcover: 216 pages
• Publisher: Cemetery Dance Publications (June 30, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1587670852
• ISBN-13: 978-1587670855
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,502,219 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Gary A. Braunbeck is a prolific author who writes mysteries, thrillers, science fiction, fantasy, horror, and mainstream literature. He is the author of 20 books -- evenly divided between novels and short-story collections; his fiction has been translated into Japanese, French, Italian, Russian, German, Czech, and Polish. Nearly 200 of his short stories have appeared in various publications.

He was born in Newark, Ohio; the city that serves as the model for the fictitious Cedar Hill in many of his novels and stories. The Cedar Hill stories are collected in Graveyard People, Home Before Dark, and the forthcoming The Carnival Within, all published by Earthling Books.

His fiction has received several awards, including 5 Bram Stoker Awards: the first for Superior Achievement in Short Fiction in 2003 for "Duty"; the second -- also for Superior Achievement in Short Story -- in 2005 for "We Now Pause for Station Identification"; his collection Destinations Unknown won the Stoker for Superior Achievement in Fiction Collection in 2006; and 2007 saw Gary winning 2 Stoker Awards; the first for co-editing the anthology 5 Strokes to Midnight, and the second for his novella "Afterward, There Will Be a Hallway." His novella "Kiss of the Mudman" received the International Horror Guild Award for Long Fiction in 2005.

As an editor, Gary completed the latest installment of the Masques anthology series created by Jerry Williamson, Masques V, after Jerry became too ill to continue.

He also served a term as president of the Horror Writers Association. He is married to Lucy Snyder, a science fiction/fantasy writer, and they reside together in Columbus, Ohio.

Gary is an adjunct professor at Seton Hill University, Pennsylvania, where he teaches in an innovative MFA program in Writing Popular Fiction.

His nonfiction writing book Fear In A Handful Of Dust: Horror As A Way Of Life has been used as a text by several college writing classes. (A revised and expanded edition of the book will be coming out in late 2010/early 2011, from Apex Books.) Gary has taught writing seminars and workshops around the country on topics such as short story writing, characterization, and dialogue.

His work is often praised for its depth of emotion and characterization, as well as for its refusal to adhere to any genre tropes; some joke that the term "cross-genre fiction" may have been invented to describe his work -- a rumor he does everything in his power to propagate.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Braunbeck's Road Rage, September 29, 2006

By 

Dan Weinstein "The Used Book Guy" (North Hollywood, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Destinations Unknown (Hardcover)

Gary Braunbeck may still not be known much yet outside of the small press, but DESTINATIONS UNKNOWN is one more piece of evidence that he's rapidly becoming one of our finest modern fantasists. The short novel that opens this collection, "The Ballad of Road Mama and Daddy Bliss", is like the flipside of J. G. Ballard's "Crash", a wry and outlandish look at car culture. Braunbeck starts with a story of an average Joe working off community service hours by driving an ambulance, but soon turns our protagonist's world upside-down, when he finds himself in a community where both cars and people are recycled, and "The Road" is a living, breathing thing. Like a great road trip, this tale takes plenty of entertaining side trips, but they all point the way to an ending full of action, comedy and horror. Probably no author since R. A. Lafferty has been able to pull off a mix like that, although comparisons to the emotional punch of Theodore Sturgeon are apt as well.

The collection is rounded out with two shorter works, "Congestion", an uncomfortable piece about a man suffering a heart attack while stuck in a traffic jam; and "Merge Right", a serious left turn into the dreadful surrealism that has marked much of the author's other work.

The volume is also graced by the fine cover art of Deena Warner. One could have wished for an introduction, perhaps discussing Braunbeck's own forays into car culture, but the excellent fiction should be enough for anyone.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars take a dark road trip, August 1, 2007

By 

Noira Janssen "Noira" (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Destinations Unknown (Hardcover)

This collection of three road trip novellas from Gary Braunbeck won the Bram Stoker Award in 2006. IMO the Stoker is well-deserved. A very entertaining book.

5.0 out of 5 stars Emotional, surprising, and fun, September 5, 2008

By 

Joseph Gut "fletch127" (Ohio USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Destinations Unknown (Hardcover)

Three stories - one novella, and two shorts. The novella, "The Ballad of Road Mama and Daddy Bliss" is equal parts strange, inventive, thought-provoking, and genuinely creative. It doesn't take long for Gary to develop sympathy for his characters and for him to always establish some personal link between the reader and his worlds.

A second story, about a man who is on a lonely drive with his wife's remains in an urn in the passenger seat, really had me near tears. The way he weaves suspense, grief, internal-dialogue, and the supernatural together, is just amazing. You feel like you're riding along in the backseat and you've known the protagonist all your life.

What I've read of Gary Braunbeck has been outstanding, and I am looking to pick up everything I can find now. I live in Ohio, too, and I've been to Denison U. which is in the town where he grew up and morphed into his fictional Cedar Hill, Ohio. You can't pass this guy up - trust me.