Cross Country Murder Song

On first appearance, you'd assume Welsh writer Philip Wilding was an American hybrid of Bukowski and pulp writer Jim Thompson, so dark and well-observed is his book about America.

Starting in a coffin, we meet the unnamed narrator, a victim of a brutal child abduction scheme, now haunted by demons and his own menagerie of body-filled coffins, he embarks on a visceral roadtrip that exposes the underbelly of American despair and depression. Each chapter is a song, a short story of America's fringes while the narrator and his dark road trip became the chorus and repeated refrain that holds the action together.

On his journey, the driver indulges his sinister hobby of picking random numbers from telephone books and insinuating himself into the lives of the people who answer, often with tragic results. He meets many people: a cast of characters as strange as they are pathetic, and whom the driver has an impact upon, either knowingly or unknowingly, during his drive. There is an ex-astronaut who weighs himself down with bits of metal so that he doesn't fly off into space again; two hunters who upset a grizzly bear and pay - one with his life, the other with his arm; a young coke dealer with aspirations to be in the film business; a porn star who has lost his erection; two cannibals mourning the loss of their son in a car accident, who eat each other for comfort; a serial killer who counts his victims by the number of snow globes he has, having bought one to celebrate each kill.