Death on Wheels »

Road rage is nothing new, but in this anthology containing nineteen high-speed tales, the cars are sometimes as enraged as their drivers. Whether it's Stephen King's spin on vindictive eighteen-wheelers or Roald Dahl's hairpin turn on a sly hitchhiker, these stories are an auto nut's dream-no, nightmare-come true. In the book's first section, Auto Mania: The Machinery of Death, a maniacal Greyhound bus, a phantom Amédée, and an overly possessive evergreen Mini are among the willful vehicles that wreck havoc. The second section, Motorway Madness: Murder in the Fast Lane, features editor Peter Haining's own The Death Car, in which two real-life folk heroes rev up a passion for their Ford V8-40 sedan, and J. G. Ballard's Crash, a shocking tale of auto-eroticism, later the basis of the controversial movie of the same name. Deadly futuristic car chases and societies gone terribly wrong are the subject of the book's third and last section, Chrome Killers: The Future Autogeddon.