destroying the vampire, but apparently ruins his
own life in the process.
The Night Stalkeris very effective both as a
novel and as a film, although the sequel, The Night
Strangler,was less satisfying. The villain this time
has achieved immortality through an occult rite
that involves the sacrifice of human life. The novel
takes too long to start unraveling the mystery, and
Kolchak’s success at the end is anticlimactic and
too reminiscent of his first adventure. Rice wrote
no further horror novels, but he popularized the
image of the reluctant vampire killer and also
proved that vampires could be just as frightening
on a brightly lit boulevard as they were in a dark
and gloomy castle.
The Night We Buried Road Dog Jack Cady
(1993)
Jack CADYis one of those rare writers in any genre
who has a genuine feel for the subcultures of Amer-
ica. This novella explores one of those worlds, one
inhabited by a small number of people in the
Northwest whose primary obsession is automobiles
and highways. The narrator is a young man who is
the close friend of Brother Jesse, an enigmatic fig-
ure who so loved his 20-year-old Hudson that when
it finally failed he dug a grave, and conducted a
burial service, and now hopes to run a cemetery for
the dead cars of other dedicated drivers. Brother
Jesse and the narrator are on a prolonged trip cross-
country when their path intersects that of the leg-
endary Road Dog, a mysterious character who few
people have actually seen, although he is known for
the cryptic messages written in an elegant hand
that he leaves on the inside walls of restrooms
wherever he goes and for the Studebaker in which
he races all comers and never loses.
The two are on their way home, each driving
his own car, when the narrator begins to see the
ghosts of highway fatalities appearing along the
side of the road. At first he suspects that they are
just hallucinations, but then another vehicle ap-
proaches from behind at an impossible rate of
speed. He recognizes it as the ghost of the Hudson
he watched being buried. Sobered, Brother Jesse
slows down and thus escapes injury when the front
end suspension fails a short time later. A similar
manifestation several days afterward saves a mu-
tual friend, whose car also concealed a hidden
deathtrap. More time passes, and the narrator,
alone this time, runs into a man who is apparently
Jesse’s supposedly dead identical twin but who is,
in fact, the fabled Road Dog.
Time passes as the narrator joins the army and
has only distant contact with his home. Word leaks
out that Jesse did indeed have a twin, which seems
to explain that anomaly, but Jesse himself is deteri-
orating, losing interest in his old life although he is
still obsessed with his automobile cemetery. Almost
by chance, the narrator stops in a town where
Jesse’s brother John is well known and where they
believe that it is Jesse who is dead. Eventually, we
learn that one of the brothers did die, but it is im-
possible to know which one, because the survivor
kept both lives moving forward, balancing one
against the other.
Cady’s story involves the supernatural, but it
is the human characters who take center stage, dis-
playing the great lengths we go to in order to hold
on to what we have lost. In addition to winning a
Bram Stoker Award, this novella also gained Cady
a grant from the National Endowment for the
Arts.Nix, Garth(1963– )
The Australian writer Garth Nix very quickly
emerged as one of the most interesting new writers
of young adult fantasy starting with Sabriel(1995),
the first volume of the Abhorsen trilogy, which
mixed traditional fantasy elements with darker
themes. The young protagonist has been warned to
stay away from an area where magic works and
where the dead are rumored to walk, but the
temptation is too great. There she encounters Ab-
horsen, whose job is to lay the dead to rest, defeat-
ing some genuinely creepy monsters in the process.
The story was intense enough to attract a consid-
erable adult audience, as did two sequels. In the
first, Lirael(2001), another young girl goes on a
lonely quest accompanied only by her dog, and in
Abhorsen(2003) we witness perhaps the ultimate
battle between good and evil, with the former try-
ing to sharpen the distinction between life and
death and the latter seeking to eliminate the liv-258 The Night We Buried Road Dog