In the title vignette, “Road Kill Art,” the young narrator takes college psychology courses in an attempt to alleviate the genetic power of inheritance and to overcome any taint from his unusual relatives. However, he quickly discovers that utilizing an oral history approach to understanding the eccentricities of his kin is only another doorway to the outré. “UFO’” examines of the power of unrealized desires; and takes a look at the possibility that alien encounters run in families. “Genealogy” follows the narrator’s compulsion to discover his forebears, and his descendants. Eighteen other short tales cover different aspects of the surreal Southern landscape.

A collection of 21 short stories, Road Kill Art and Other Oddities pokes gentle yet loving fun at the eccentricities of a rural South which doesn’t appear on the billboards touting tourism, nor in the speeches of politicians promoting the values of the New South. Niles Reddick’s Southern landscape features the surreal as well as the sublime, the eccentric right alongside the downright odd.