Blue World

"We will travel, you and I, across a tortured land where hope struggles to grow like seed in a drought. In this land, a place with no boundaries, we'll run the freeways and back roads and we'll listen to the song of the wheels and peer into windows at lives that might be our own, if we lived in that land." So Robert McCammon introduces this superb collection of 13 stories, nominated for a 1990 Bram Stoker Award for Best Story Collection. The standouts are "Blue World" (a richly imagined novella about a priest facing temptation); "Nightcrawlers" (a World Fantasy Award-winner about a Vietnam vet in a roadside diner); "Night Calls the Green Falcon" (has-been fictional hero dons his old costume to fight real evil); "Yellowjacket Summer" (fateful stop for gas in backwoods Georgia); and "Pin" (dare you to read that one). All of the stories are excellent.