Flyby Five is usually a Wednesday feature but we’re moving it to today in honour of Ugly Truck Day. Big rigs and trucks are woefully under-used in horror. There is something scary about them. Their size, their noise, the rumble as they go by. The sheer brute force of them. They’re not exactly ugly but their very power can make them seem that way. Maybe I have a special fondness for them. My dad was a truck driver, oil rigs at first and then cross-country so, to me, they are also a thing of beauty, in their own way.
Now that bit of nostalgia is out of the way let me introduce you to some books with some evil trucks and, sometimes, their drivers.
Flyby Five, where we abandon all sense of seriousness and do silly lists about whatever pops into our heads. This segment will be posted every Wednesday we feel like posting it. This is not a serious list, nor is it a “Top 5” list. And there is every possible chance that some of these lists or the language in these lists may not be PG-13 friendly. You have been warned. -L&G
Flyby Five: 5 Ugly Trucks to Terrorize Your Highways
18 Wheels of Horror: A Trailer Full of Trucking Terrors – Edited by Eric Miller
Psychotic killers, devious ghosts, alien monsters, howling storms, undead creatures, and other dark forces haunt the highways and the truckers who drive them in these 18 chilling tales!
A ghostly voice on a trucker’s CB radio knows more about his life than it should… Two drivers find their cargo gives them inhuman appetites… A boy in a truck stop encounters a supernatural force that threatens to destroy the world… The hypnotic singing lulling a driver to sleep might not be coming from the tires… A fender-bender between a big rig and a four wheeler is not as accidental as it seems… The sinister cargo lurking in a rock and roll band’s fleet of trucks is unleashed at their final show…
Hit the road with this anthology of trucking horror fiction! – Goodreads
The Black Mariah – Jay Bonansinga
Lucas Hyde and Sophie Cohen, a tough trucking pair, are driving through the Tennessee night in their rig when they hear an eerie voice on the CB radio wailing for help. A curse as old as evil itself is leaving a trail of corpses. It has found its next victims and will strike with hellish fury if Lucas and Sophie ever stop moving. – Goodreads
Lot Lizards – Ray Garton
A “lot lizard” is a female hooker who works a highway truck stop as her territory. When trucker Bill Ketter looks for a little relaxation and release, he discovers, too late, that he has bitten off more than he can chew. In fact, his lot lizard is the one that does the biting–she is a vampire, one of number who move from one truck stop to the next under the watchful and vicious eyes of the repulsive Carsey Brothers. Against his will, Bill becomes one of the undead. He follows the brothers and their cargo to another stop where he meets his ex-wife and children and Bill finds himself battling the vampires and their age-old leader for the life of his teenaged son. Garton has created another small masterpiece, contemporary adult horror at its most gruesome and loaded with extras doses of sex and gore. The confined setting creates a perfect claustrophobic stage for the story and the hellaciously quick pace never lets the action slow down. – Goodreads
(I have to pause for an annoying biographical moment. We used to have a sticker on the truck that looked something like this: 
. Also, Security at one of the Pilot truck stops thought I was one. He stopped me, asked if I was a driver and when I said no, asked what truck I was with. I pointed it out and he watched until I climbed into the cab. Could have been the purple hair and dog collar that caught his eye.)
Road Rage – 2 Novellas: Duel by Richard Matheson and Throttle by Stephen King and Joe Hill
Road Rage unites Richard Matheson’s classic “Duel” and the contemporary work it inspired–two power-packed short stories by three of the genre’s most acclaimed authors. “Duel,” an unforgettable tale about a driver menaced by a semi truck, was the source for Stephen Spielberg’s acclaimed first film of the same name. “Throttle,” by Stephen King and Joe Hill, is a duel of a different kind, pitting a faceless trucker against a tribe of motorcycle outlaws, in the simmering Nevada desert. Their battle is fought out on twenty miles of the most lonely road in the country, a place where the only thing worse than not knowing what you’re up against, is slowing down . . . – Goodreads
Trucks – Stephen King
The short story by Stephen King that was the basis for the movie ‘Maximum Overdrive’.
Take a day to appreciate the beauty of an ugly truck around you! I plan on giving our truck a bath. That is, if it doesn’t fall apart. It’s not nicknamed Tetanus for nothing!