My friend is looking for a short story that she read in the 1970s, probably called “Traffic Jam” about a group of friends who encounter a traffic jam in a tunnel, only to find out that they are dead, and on line to get into the hereafter. Anybody heard of it, or know the author?
[Unhelpful response] Oooh, that reminds me of a story I read years ago about the London Underground - a load of people are on a Tube train that doesn’t stop, just keeps on going for hours with no stations, and the walls of the tunnel get rockier and rockier, and it starts to get hotter and hotter. Eventually the train stops at a station marked “HELL”, with demons and pitchforks on the platform waiting for them. But I can’t remember what it was called. [/unhelpful response]
I believe the story mentioned in the OP was called “The Jam.” It appeared in an edition of Playboy in the 1960s or early 1970s.
I’ve got an anthology of Playboy’s horror stories at home that includes this story. I’ll dig it up over the weekend and find the author.
After a bit of Googling, I found an online version of “The Jam,” by Henry Slesar. I was off a bit – it appeared in the November 1958 edition of Playboy.
The link to the story is here. I don’t know that copyright is being violated by linking to an online version of the story; if copyright is violated, mea culpa. Mods, please remove the link in that case.
jjimm, that sounds like a John Wyndham story, that I can’t remember the name of … I think it was in the short story collection Jizzle, but I’m not 100% sure.
(This is what you get for being unhelpful - someone being unhelpful right back at you … )