Six stories. Five nocturnal interludes. A world quietly coming apart.FORKSIn a town built over a nuclear testing site, a sleepless engineer watches his silverware disappear piece by piece.THERE'S A MAN AT THE DOORA fugitive checks into a roadside motel room that already belongs to someone else.THE CRYING WOMAN IN ROOM 202After a fight, a woman calls her boyfriend ninety-seven times from a motel. When he finally arrives, she is calmer and kinder than he has ever seen her—and knows things she shouldn't.MOONLIGHT JAZZOn January 9, 1947, a cartoonist shares coffee with a stranger hours before she becomes the victim of the most infamous unsolved murder in Los Angeles history.CAMP DOOMSix friends celebrating graduation retreat to an isolated mountain cabin, where a lonely local behaves as though he has known them all their lives.NIGHTMARE AT THE ELROY ON NOWHERE ST.A writer awakens from a nightmare about an empty Manhattan theater. Then its ballroom music follows him home.Spare, uncanny, and darkly American, Bad Times with Julian Mercer moves through nuclear towns, roadside motels, forgotten rooms, mountain roads, and cities emptied of everything but their machinery. Julian Mercer's first public collection is a fractured work of noir and psychological horror about isolation, obsession, evil, and the moment ordinary life slips—almost imperceptibly—into nightmare.Featuring Moonlight Jazz, Camp Doom, and five nocturnal interludes by Jack Chase, author of Made in America and Violent Crimes.
