Edge of the Known Bus Line by James R. Gapinski

A woman’s daily commute takes an abrupt turn when she’s dropped off in a grotesque shantytown in Edge of the Known Bus Line. The townsfolk live in huts and tents scavenged from broken trinkets. They eat dead rats and human flesh. They’ve developed cult-like religions about miracle bus routes that will someday set them free. The narrator searches for a way out of this surreal hellscape while dredging up a few nightmares of her own.

Disturbingly hilarious and weirdly affecting, Gapinski’s novella is a stunning fable about what it means to live in late capitalism, an answer to our great predicament: how, indeed, do we “carve something dead into something that matters”? Hallucinatory, savage, but ultimately hopeful, Edge of the Known Bus Line is a bloody bible for our times.

—Maryse Meijer, author of Heartbreaker

This is a bus we’ve all been on, and this is a town we all carry around with us. The only question is: will James R. Gapinski let us out where we want, or where we deserve?

—Stephen Graham Jones, author of Mongrels

Part Kafka-esque dystopia, part Lord of the Flies, part modern allegory, James R. Gapinski’s novella Edge of the Known Bus Line takes us on a one-way trip to the end of civilization and the beginning of what it means to be human.

—Melissa Reddish, author of Girl & Flame

The apocalyptic nightmare that James R. Gapinski conjures is unsettling from the start. . . We are led through this strange world by a freelance butcher who becomes an unlikely hero in a rotting state where dead ravens litter the landscape and starvation is endemic. This horrifying, bleak tale is also blackly comic. Swallow it whole.

—Laura E. Joyce, author of Luminol Theory