"What happens when ordinary people are pushed beyond their ordinary lives? What happens when we are challenged to transcend our everyday circumstances, take a fearful risk, accept the dare, perhaps change who we are? Treading a line between pain and passion, adventure and menace, Stop Breakin Down tells various stories of people driven to the brink of endurance and survival. In the title story, a group of young people commit themselves to a drunken car chase around the Baltimore beltway; in "Gegenschein," a young student leaves his campus to submerge himself into the desolate wilderness of the Smoky Mountains; and in "The Magothy Fires," a boy seeks to become a man in an ancient ritual of pain and courage."--BOOK JACKET.