Mile 81 is Stand by Me meets Christine-the story of an insatiable car and a heroic kid.

At Mile 81 within the Maine Turnpike is a boarded-up rest stop, a place where high school kids drink and enter the kind of trouble senior high school children have usually gotten into. It’s where Pete Simmons, armed only using the magnifying glass he got for his tenth birthday, finds a discarded container of vodka in the boarded up burger shack and drinks enough to pass out. Not much afterwards, a mud-covered train station about Mile 81: Includes bonus story ‘The Dune’ wagon (which can be unusual because there hadn’t been any rainfall in New England for over a week) veers into the Mile 81 relax area, ignoring the sign that says “shut, no providers.” The driver’s door starts but nobody gets out.

By enough time Pete Simmons wakes up from his vodka nap, you will find six cars in the Mile 81 rest end. But two kids and a equine are the just living things left…unless you maybe count number the wagon. With the heart of Stand By Me as well as the genius horror of Christine, Mile 81 is definitely Stephen Ruler unleashing his creativity as he drives past one of those road signs.

In the bonus tale “The Dune,” originally released in Granta’s October 2011 horror issue, retired Florida Supreme Courtroom Judge Harvey Beecher tells his lawyer about a strange sand dune on an unnamed isle a short distance from the Gulf coastline of his family’s home. Harvey first visited the island at the age of ten in 1932, after his grandfather, a scoundrel and property speculator who’d produced the family fortune, informed him Blackbeard’s treasure may be buried there. Planing a trip to the isle became a regular addiction for Harvey…and right now his lawyer is about to discover the shocking reason why.