The Skeleton Train

The Skeleton Train tells the story of Jason Audley, a modern Huck Finn. Jason is a character that readers know (or may have been). Alienated and lonely, capable but doubting, he’s a young man on the margins, a ghost to the mainstream. Yet inside he’s wry, reflective, inquisitive, sometimes daring.


Jason is not alone in this world. He shares it with his divorced parents, his acerbic sister, his mother’s new lover, and Davey Miller, the high school’s most popular kid. He and Davey are bound by their common fascination with hopping freight trains. 


On one of these increasingly dangerous trips, they encounter a mysterious girl, as well as the sinister Freight Train Riders of America (a real organization akin to the Hell’s Angels in reputation). Jason and Davey are drawn into a wild adventure that ultimately becomes a kind of quest. Along the way, Jason is forced to make many choices--about friendship, about priorities, and about his own sense of right and wrong. And Jason finds that these choices can have life and death consequences.