What a Drag It Is Being Dead

by Tony Fonseca

05/15/2007

Braunbeck, Gary A. Destinations Unknown. Baltimore, MD: Cemetery Dance, 2006. 216 p.

I was cruisin' in my Stingray late one night
When an XKE pulled up on the right
And rolled down the window of his shiny new Jag
And challenged me then and there to a drag

Dead Man's Curve, Jan & Dean (Christian/Berry/Kornfeld/Wilson)

 

Even after you manage to figure out Gary A. Braunbeck’s shtick, he still manages to amaze. Such is the case with his new trilogy of tales, collected under the title Destinations Unknown. This volume is centered around the novella “The Ballad of Road Mama and Daddy Bliss,” which is far more intelligent, thought-provoking, and creepy than its title might indicate. Also included here are two shorter stories, “Congestions” and “Merge Right,” both of which are interesting in their own rights, but neither of which matches the raw power of the novella, which, to put it bluntly, one has to read to believe.

If you’ve read any of my reviews, by now you realize that I am a hardcore Braunbeck fan (although I try not to be a fawning one). The reason for this is quite simple: as well-read as I am in general and particularly in the horror fiction genre, I would be hard-pressed to name a writer who is consistently more inventive, more unpredictable with where his plots are headed. I am fairly sure that I have figured out his vision. I would hazard a guess that Braunbeck is concerned with reality as a myth, or as a series of myths. These mythological explanations of horrors such as child molestation, deformity, elder abuse, cruelty to animals, and in this case, highway deaths, are filled with horrifying, grotesque imagery. They disrupt our happy little worlds, serve to disquiet our perceptions of reality, perhaps even disgust us a little, but more than anything else, they make us see reality as a string of supernatural possibilities, usually tied to folklore or mythology.

“The Ballad of Road Mama and Daddy Bliss” is a story of this type. Somewhat of a companion piece to Prodigal Blues (Cemetery Dance, 2006, see my review in Dead Reckonings #1, it is also a road trip story. However, where the narrator of Prodigal Blues is more or less an innocent bystander who is dragged into a terrifying journey with a troupe of disfigured, abused children, the narrator of “Road Mama” is in no way a total innocent. This first-person narration tells the tale of a DWI offender who is given community service—in this case a rather appropriate assignment, as he is made to ride shotgun with a morgue employee. If retrieving dead bodies does little to make him realize the ways in which he has been tempting the gods, a discovery during one of these retrievals does. The two find an elderly shut-in who has apparently committed suicide. In her apartment are hundreds and hundreds of feet of hot wheel style tracks, sculpted to look much like an extremely complex and realistic interstate exchange. The narrator notices that she even has reproduced accidents and fatalities, in the form of roadside memorials, and that these accidents are representations of recent local, often bizarre pile-ups.

He, like the reader, imagines that this shut-in had nothing better to do and a morbid fascination with death—that is until he realizes that she has actually predicted accidents and casualties before they happen. This and other snooping gets him into trouble with an unknown but very powerful entity, and he is given money and a charge: to transport the woman’s body to her home for burial. While on the road, he is led to take a wrong turn, and finds himself in a grotesque land where humans who ended their lives as traffic fatalities have been literally reconstructed from remaining body parts, and remnants of junked cars. Each of these characters has a new identity, their new names being a reflection of how they died, or what they were driving when they died. At this point we are informed that The Highway Gods, which more or less began to evolve when the very first human blood was spilled because of an automobile, routinely recruit humans to manufacture more accidents, so that their bloodlust can continually be satiated. Other disquieting “facts” about this reality also begin to surface, as for example, the fact that each human is predetermined to have a propensity to die in an accident, based on a die roll at his or her birth. In short, we are all nothing more than playthings of the gods.

Like any hero who travels into the underworld, the narrator is given a Herculean task: if he can defeat in a drag race the ultimate driving machine, a half-man, half-machine monstrosity who prides himself on winning at all costs. If he manages to do this, he and his loved ones will be spared by the highway gods. If he fails, he remains forever in the surreal nightmare into which he has driven, perhaps even becoming one of the deformed.

“Congestions” is a much simpler story. Here being stuck in traffic begins to challenge the sanity of an average guy. As he ostensibly loses his mind, he notices one otherworldly image after another. Like many good horror stories, this one leaves readers to wonder whether or not it really is all in the mind, or whether there is actually something out there. “Merge Right” is a creepy story about a man whose mission (many of Braunbeck’s heroes have a “mission” to perform, thereby unlocking the secret to their very being) is to transport a dead body as well, in this case his wife’s ashes, to a final resting place. With each mile he discovers that he isn’t in Kansas anymore.

Braunbeck has been compared to writers like J. G. Ballard, R. A. Lafferty, and Theodore Sturgeon. He is certainly deserving of such praise. I personally find him to be similar to the late Robert Aickman, who was also quite interested in depicting the world as a diversity of interesting myths and folktales. Braunbeck’s themes are similar, and his characters react in much the same way, with a mixture of horror and wonder. He is, however, much, much darker and much more raw. While I would not call his fictive worlds gory, they are certainly disgusting, even revolting at times. While this may be nothing more than a clever ploy to draw in hardcore readers, I am more inclined to believe that blood and guts, in the actual physical sense of the words, are the stuff which inform Braunbeck’s nightmarish visions. But he does more than, as Stephen King termed it in Danse Macabre, go for the “gross out.” He takes us beyond the gross out, in fact right through it, to be reborn into a new understanding of what it means to be a human in a world full of ineffable intangibles.