All they wanted was a vacation to the Grand Canyon. Instead, they found themselves on a collision course with a terrible, timeless darkness. Welcome to Adrienne, home to history's worst serial killers and mass murderers. Nestled in an isolated meadow high in the Sierra Nevada, Adrienne is sort of like a cosmic lint trap. It collects the universe's negative energy-all of our blackest human impulses-before purging that darkness back into the world in a yearly lottery. From Hitler to Bin Laden...Bundy to Gacy, Adrienne is the way station for dark energy that doesn't just pass on-it passes through. When Phil Benson decides to take an unmarked detour over the mountain, he drives his family into the mouth of madness, where they are forced to join a captive labor pool with little hope for freedom. Escape is pointless and time stretches out into eternity, with every new day the same as the last. Sometimes, it's better just to skip the shortcut. With echoes of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," Stephen King's Needful Things, and Blake Crouch's Pines series, Cold on the Mountain treads the boundary between horror and supernatural suspense.

Daniel Powell teaches a variety of courses at a small college in Northeast Florida. He is an avid outdoorsman and long-distance runner, and enjoys fishing the tidal creeks of Duval County from atop his kayak.

He shares a small house near Florida's Intracoastal Waterway with his wife, Jeanne, and his daughter, Lyla. His stories have appeared in Redstone Science Fiction, Brain Harvest, Leading Edge, Something Wicked and Well Told Tales.

Drop by The Byproduct, his web journal on speculative storytelling, at www.danielwpowell.blogspot.com.