What creepypasta lends to its readers is a sense of the uncanny encroaching on reality. At its best, this distortion straddles the line between the unimaginable and the tactile. They work as constructed urban legends, where maybe it didn’t happen to you, but it did happen. In the age of the internet, where life has been thoroughly demystified, the creepypasta offers testimonial proof to the otherworldly. That it still exists, because something happened—to a friend of a friend of a friend.
The Rules of the Road by C.B. Jones understands the mechanics that make creepypasta work, and it successfully utilizes them while expanding on their constraints and combining them with a sharp sense of emotional resonance. You could just as easily call Rules a novel as you could a short story collection, though I guess the most insightful of us would call it a mosaic novel. It manages to take the best of both worlds—flashes of instant familiarity torn from common experience and an obsessive wrap-around that grounds it all. The Rules of the Road does this without the usual negative trappings of the genre, feeling well-crafted under sure-hands throughout. The end result is a laudable ride down the schism between the known and the unknowable.
The idea at the center of Jones’ novel is a self-propagating engine: a folksy voice on the radio, detailing the titular rules. If you follow the instructions, you have nothing to worry about. If you don’t? Well, Buck Hensley will let you know. The rules themselves are a highlight of the book—each of them mirroring the American Road Trip Experience. Everyone has seen the “For a good time call…” graffiti. Everyone has seen the lone shoe on the side of the highway. Everyone has held their breath while passing a graveyard. These images that make up the American roadscape, combined with automobile superstitions, form a new mythology under Jones’ expert hands. The acuteness of their observations are the perfect pathway to creating a sense of tension amidst our familiarity.
The stories here are uniformly excellent, if sometimes a little overlong. Although Jones does an excellent job of using his formula without beating it into the ground. While each story is framed as a tale from the road, they’re all very distinct with unique characters, rules, and outcomes. It’d be easy to write a book where every character breaks a rule and dies (and that’d be a very boring book), but The Rules of the Road features a lot of diversity despite using the same set-up for a large portion of the book. There’s stories about touring musicians, survivor’s guilt, urban prejudice, and more. The Rule acts sometimes as a comeuppance, sometimes as a savior—but it affects each character differently. Which is why it’s hard to say Rules only takes its cues from creepypasta, as while the concept is a powerful driving force here, Jones never loses sight of his characters.
These rules, delivered by eldritch radio DJ Buck Hensley become a familiar delight throughout the book, as well as sort of a running joke. By the end of the novel, where Jones takes us to a surprising emotional place, Buck’s voice is stuck in our heads. He’s the country-fried coyote of the airwaves, gluing together disparate tales with his folksy warnings. In my mind, he has the muscle to be every bit of the modern spook as Slenderman, something people joke about on the open road, when the radio turns to static.
The Rules of the Road is a fantastic piece of horror storytelling that feels like a grand accumulation of influences—a meeting point between the modern literary horror short and the populist urban legend. C.B. Jones has written a book that melds these influences into something uniquely tuned into the horror zeitgeist, a call and answer to the unknowable—a yearning for blank spaces, tall tales, and rogue signals.