The Crossroads
Fantasy Short Stories Collection • Book 4
by L. Ron Hubbard
Why You'll Love This
A fed-up farmer rebels against government overreach — then stumbles into something that makes politics look very, very small.
- Great if you want: sharp Twilight Zone-style twists wrapped in rural Americana
- The experience: fast and punchy — done in a single sitting, lingering after
- The writing: Hubbard builds ordinary tension before pulling the reality out from under you
- Skip if: you want depth over a clever, self-contained concept story
About This Book
At the heart of The Crossroads is a deceptively simple premise: a stubborn farmer, fed up with bureaucratic absurdity, loads his wagon and heads to the city to sell his crops on his own terms. But L. Ron Hubbard never lets a straightforward setup stay that way for long. What begins as a sharp-edged fable about individual will versus institutional control quickly tilts into stranger, more disorienting territory—where the rules of reality bend and a man's certainties about the world prove far more fragile than he imagined. The emotional pull here isn't spectacle; it's the unsettling recognition that the ground beneath ordinary life may not be as solid as it looks.
Hubbard's great strength in this collection is compression. These are stories built for efficiency—every scene earns its place, and the prose moves with a kind of confident, wry momentum that keeps pages turning without ever feeling rushed. There's wit woven into the tension, and the satirical edge gives the fantasy its bite. Readers who appreciate fiction that makes a philosophical point while keeping its story hat firmly on will find this a genuinely engaging read.
