The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

The Bazaar of Bad Dreams is a collection of 20 short stories, poems, and novellas. The works range across horror, literary realism, fantasy, dark comedy, and speculative fiction, linked by concerns with mortality, moral compromise, the consequences of desire, and what lies beyond death.

The collection opens with "Mile 81," in which 10-year-old Pete Simmons sneaks into an abandoned rest area on Interstate 95, drinks vodka, and falls asleep inside the derelict Burger King. While he sleeps, a mud-coated station wagon appears on the entrance ramp. The car is a predatory entity that absorbs flesh on contact. It devours several motorists who stop to help, including the parents of two small children, Rachel and Blake Lussier, and a state trooper. Pete awakens and uses his magnifying glass to focus sunlight on the creature, burning through its skin and driving it into the sky.

"Premium Harmony" shifts to spare, minimalist realism. Ray and Mary Burkett, a bickering couple, drive to Walmart with their terrier Biz. Mary stops at a convenience store for a kickball, collapses inside, and dies of a heart attack. When Ray returns to the car, he finds Biz dead from the heat. He weeps, buys cheap cigarettes, and smokes all the way to the hospital with the dead dog in the backseat.

In "Batman and Robin Have an Altercation," Sanderson, a jewelry store owner, takes his father, who has Alzheimer's, to their usual Sunday lunch at Applebee's. Pop experiences a rare moment of clarity, recalling a Halloween when they trick-or-treated as Batman and Robin. On the drive back, a truck cuts into Sanderson's lane, causing a collision. Sanderson flips off the driver, a large, tattooed man who beats him savagely. Pop intervenes by stabbing the attacker in the neck with a steak knife he stole from the restaurant, then asks if they have eaten yet.

"The Dune" follows 90-year-old Judge Harvey Beecher, who has spent 80 years paddling to a small island off the Florida Gulf coast to check a dune where names appear written in the sand. Every person whose name appears dies within a month. Beecher urgently summons his lawyer, Anthony Wayland, to finalize his will. Wayland assumes the judge saw his own name. Beecher smiles and says the name was not his.

"Bad Little Kid" is framed as a condemned prisoner's confession. George Hallas, a mild-mannered accountant on death row, tells his lawyer about a demonic boy, unchanged in age across decades, who destroyed everyone Hallas loved: a childhood friend killed by a car, a college girlfriend driven to suicide, his father killed in a mine explosion, and his unborn daughter lost to a miscarriage. When the creature targeted another child, Hallas chased it across six lanes of traffic and shot it. The body was never identified. After Hallas's execution, the lawyer finds a propeller beanie on his car seat with a note reading "SEE YOU SOON."

"A Death" is set in the Dakota Territory. Jim Trusdale is arrested, tried, and hanged for strangling a 10-year-old girl and stealing her silver birthday dollar. The sheriff harbors doubts because the dollar was never found. After the hanging, the undertaker discovers it in Trusdale's soiled undergarments: He had swallowed it when the posse arrived and re-swallowed it each time it passed through his body during his month in jail. The sheriff, who believed the man innocent, is left holding the evidence of his guilt.

"Morality" traces the disintegration of a marriage. Nora Callahan, a home nurse, and her husband Chad are financially desperate. Nora's patient, the Reverend George Winston, a retired minister, offers $200,000 if she will go to a playground and punch a small child in the face while Chad videotapes it. Winston wants to experience deliberate sin before he dies. The couple agonizes but agrees. The moral contamination of the act spreads through their relationship: Their lovemaking turns violent, Nora has an affair, Chad breaks her nose, and they divorce.

"Afterlife" imagines what follows death. William Andrews, an investment banker, dies of colon cancer at 56 and finds himself in a dingy office. There he meets Isaac Harris, co-owner of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, where 146 workers died in a 1911 fire because the exit doors were locked. Harris, trapped in purgatorial duty, offers two doors: One leads to oblivion, the other to reliving the same life with the same mistakes and no memory of having lived before. Andrews chooses life. He is born again and remembers nothing.

"Ur" follows Wesley Smith, a college English instructor who buys a pink Kindle that accesses over 10 million alternate realities. He downloads novels that do not exist in his world and discovers a function that shows future local news. When he reads that his girlfriend Ellen Silverman's basketball team bus will crash, killing Ellen and seven students, Wesley and a student drive to intercept the drunk driver. Mysterious inhuman enforcers in yellow coats confiscate the Kindle and warn Wesley never to meddle again.

"Herman Wouk Is Still Alive" intercuts two narratives: two elderly poets sharing a picnic at a Maine rest area, and two impoverished single mothers driving a van full of children while drinking coffee brandy. The van accelerates to nearly 100 miles an hour and crashes into a tree, bursting into flames. One of the poets consoles herself with the thought that Herman Wouk, the 95-year-old novelist, is still alive.

"Under the Weather" is narrated by Brad Franklin, an advertising executive who describes his daily routine of walking the dog, going to work, and leaving notes for his wife Ellen, who he says has a bronchial infection. Gradually the details accumulate: complaints about a smell in the building, the dog chewing on something, flies in the apartment. Brad tucks Ellen's decomposing hand under the covers, maintaining the fiction that she is merely resting.

Other stories include "Blockade Billy," about a rookie catcher who murdered a farm family and assumed their son's identity; "Obits," about a journalist who discovers his written obituaries kill living people, with collateral damage spreading to anyone sharing the victim's name; "Mister Yummy," in which an elderly gay man sees an apparition from his past as a herald of death; "The Little Green God of Agony," where a faith healer extracts a physical parasite of pain from a billionaire's body; "That Bus Is Another World," in which a man witnesses a murder through a bus window and chooses not to intervene; and "Drunken Fireworks," a comic tale of escalating Fourth of July fireworks rivalry between lakeside neighbors. The collection also includes two poems: "The Bone Church," about a doomed jungle expedition to an elephants' graveyard, and "Tommy," memorializing a young gay man who died of leukemia in 1969.

The collection closes with "Summer Thunder," set after a global nuclear exchange. Peter Robinson lives alone by a Vermont lake with Gandalf, a stray dog who arrived after the bombs fell. As radiation poisoning kills the wildlife and then his only neighbor, Robinson injects Gandalf with Demerol to spare the dog. The next morning, Robinson's own symptoms appear. He installs a new battery in his Harley-Davidson, rides down the lake road with blood streaming from his nose, and opens the throttle toward Dead Man's Curve.