The story is vintage Stephen King. Alan Parker, 21, learns that his beloved mother has had a stroke and hitchhikes through rural Maine to see her. On the way he's picked up first by a horrid old man, then by someone far more awful: a dead young man --the dead man, George Staub, drives a Mustang, and as the corpse pulls on a cigarette, Alan sees "little trickles of smoke escape from the stitched incision on his neck." Staub offers Alan a terrible choice - a choice of life or death. Stephen King's simple, potent prose skims along spurred by high suspense, it roils like a classic nightmare: a moonlit graveyard, howling wind, rising mist; but King spins them all with a wicked modern touch.