Milestone

From the Bram Stoker Award-Winning author of THE TURTLE BOY, KIN, and JACK & JILL. Somewhere out west there is a town called Milestone. You will not find it on any map. If you're lucky, you won't find it at all. Once a thriving mining community, the few souls who still dwell there know nothing of hope and everything of damnation. Because Milestone may appear near-death, a ghost town in the making, but it is very much alive. There are the stories of invisible barriers that open and close the borders on a whim, sometimes fatally, the whispers of a man in a top hat who comes cycling up out of the darkness of the abandoned mine to change the fate of the town, the buried music box that summons him, the people with unnatural powers, the old man who counts stacks of pennies and prays they never fall...and the fires that burn brightly with the sounds of screams. Milestone is very much alive, and those unlucky souls trapped within its borders have little choice but to learn the true nature of their prison, or become its latest victim. And even as they fight against the inevitable, the borders continue to expand. Milestone is growing. Included here are the novellas 'The Witch', 'Saturday Night at Eddie's', 'Thirty Miles South of Dry County' and 'The Palaver'.

Welcome to Eddie's Tavern, the only functioning waterhole in a near-dead town. Among the people you'll meet tonight are: Tom, Milestone's haunted lawman, who walks in the shadow of death; Gracie, the barmaid, a wannabe actress, doomed to spend her hours tending bar in a purgatory of her father's making; Flo, the town seductress, who may or may not have murdered her husband; Cobb, a nudist awaiting an apology from the commune who cast him out; Wintry, the mute giant, whose story is told only in cryptic messages scribbled beneath newspaper headlines; Kyle, the kid, who keeps a loaded gun beneath the table; and Cadaver, who looks like a corpse, but smells real nice, and occupies his time counting stacks of pennies. And then there's Reverend Hill, who will be in at eleven, regular as clockwork, to tell them who's going to die, and who's going to drive. Welcome to Eddie's, where tonight, for the first time in three years, nothing will go according to plan...and Hell will come to Milestone.