Books › Riding the Bullet
Riding the Bullet
First published 2002 · 400 pages
A dread-soaked midnight ride down a lonely highway where the toll is paid in impossible, guilt-ridden choices.
What it feels like
Reading this feels like sitting in the passenger seat of a stranger's car on a pitch-black highway, watching the headlights illuminate things you were never meant to see. It is a brisk, claustrophobic journey that masterfully blends the mundane anxiety of a family medical emergency with the surreal terror of a classic campfire ghost story. The prose is conversational and grounded, pulling you into a false sense of security before springing a psychological trap that forces you to confront the darkest, most selfish corners of human survival. It delights readers who crave horror that lingers not through gore, but through the haunting, melancholic weight of impossible choices and the inescapable reality of our own mortality.
- Mood
- eerie
- dread-soaked
- claustrophobic
- nocturnal
- Tone
- conversational
- morbid
- suspenseful
- introspective
- Pace
- brisk
- Themes
- fear of mortality · survivor's guilt · impossible choices · parental loss · the selfishness of survival
- The writing
- Colloquial and visceral, grounding supernatural terrors in the gritty, recognizable details of a cold Maine highway.
- The arc
- Starts with the frantic anxiety of a midnight emergency, plunges into surreal terror, and leaves behind a lingering, melancholic ache of guilt.
- Who it's for
- Readers who love campfire ghost stories that dig into the dark, selfish instincts of human survival.
Content notes
- parental illness
- grief
- supernatural horror
- death
About the book
When he gets a call that his mother has suffered a stroke, college student, Alan Parker, has no car to get him from the University of Maine campus to Lewiston where she has been hospitalized. He is able to hitch a ride with a stranger who offers him a no-win choice.
Description from Open Library.
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