Detours are amazing creatures.

A detour can shortcut your existence or it can lead you down a forever long road that will linger far into the distant reaches of eternity. It is these unexpected tangents that people stumble across nearly every day that will haunt you in a frighteningly familiar fashion.

Wander into a laundromat and find a kind of a time machine. Indulge yourself in a particularly nasty game of baseball. Hitch a ride on a freight train with the piggyback man or entomb yourself in a trailer walled with books or take a ride on a bus that is going nowhere fast or just lean over an empty ocean and wait for the very first mermaid you see.

Detour around an overturned trailer of chickens and find a chance to do it all over again. Take a taxi ride with a very hungry passenger or just walk in the park and watch a juggler balancing severed heads.

Reality will take you only so far and after that there is nothing to rely on but faith and fear.

I offer you eighteen eerie tales of fantasy, horror, science fiction and all around strangeness that will take you to the edge of the map and then nudge you just a little bit further.

If Harlan Ellison, Richard Matheson and Robert Bloch had a three-way sex romp in a hot tub, and then a team of scientists came in and filtered out the water and mixed the leftover DNA into a test tube, the resulting genetic experiment would most likely grow up into Steve Vernon. - Bookgasm