Synopsis
A young musician finds himself locked inside a gas station bathroom in the middle of the night by an unseen assailant, caught between the horrors on the other side of the door and the horrors rapidly skittering down the walls inside.
Review
Let’s start this review with a simple statement.
I love short, sharp, novellas, and I especially love these quick vignettes when they are tense, twisting and anxiety inducing thrill rides. And this is exactly what Rest Stop by Nat Cassidy is.
We follow Abe, a musician on a night drive to see his dying grandmother one final time, whilst also reconnecting with family. On his way, he stops at a gas station rest stop, goes inside to use the bathroom, then finds himself locked in. And really, this is all the set up you need to know before Cassidy grabs you by the proverbial balls and whisks you down this spiralling, locked-in-a-room thriller. Think a weirder, more psychological horror based Green Room (the 2015 movie about a rock band locked in the backstage area of a venue after witnessing a Neo-Nazi gang commit a murder), or even a more creepy crawly infested version of 127 Hours. Rest Stop thrives by putting Abe into this immediately desperate and distressing liminal space.
The rest stop itself is exactly how you’d imagine any middle-of-nowhere gas station bathroom. It’s a compact space with a toilet in one corner and a mirror and sink in another, filled with the histories – the scribblings and doodles, knicks and knocks – of countless other pissers and shitters. These innocuous details, the crudes messages on the wall, the grime around the tap, the dirt streaked mirror, all create this familiar space we have all seen time and again, in various faces and styles that I think can be universally understood. It’s a shared space (if not physically shared when you’re using it) and it’s a place to reset, to break up the journey into more manageable chunks. It’s an area that is liminal, in both its utilisation and familiarity, and so Cassidy’s perversion of this – mainly, how he twists this on its head – is wholly chilling. Knocking that tension up bit by bit as the story progresses in the way that he does also made me sweaty, grinning from ear to ear as things build. I find this feeling hard to describe; I myself HATE to be in any situation where there is tension involved. But reading it, or seeing our character go through it themselves, makes me giddy. It’s the giddiness in my gut that confirms to me that I am reading something special.
It’s also disorienting in its telling, yet a wholly vivid and truly cinematic experience. I felt there, in amongst the piss puddles and pube piles of the bathroom, versus the super bright halogen lights of the store itself. I also felt like I could see the cinematography within the pages. It was so clear to me how certain shots were framed and how certain sequences were filmed, insofar as much as this can be applied to the written word. I mean this in a way that any cinephile would talk about how they love the technicality of a Denis Villeneuve picture, for example. I felt the claustrophobic push of the bathroom walls, I could hear the subtle score and the discordant strings when something more horrific rears its head.
I’m trying to be vague with the actual events of the story within this review. I feel like all you need to know is “man stuck in bathroom, bad shit happens” and then just let Nat Cassidy take over from there. There’s themes of generational trauma, survivors guilt, relationships with friends & family, “jewishness”, music and our attachment to it. All of these themes and the events that transpire in this 124 page ride weave together to tell something intense, chaotic, thought-provoking, challenging, terrifying, and just plain awesome. It’s like the best A24 movie in novella format, a story crying out for a screen adaption, and frankly, a super exciting literal edge-of-your-seat scream of a tale. I can’t wait to read more Nat Cassidy!
Side note: Nat Cassidy is often featured on the Talking Scared podcast. This isn’t an ad for the podcast, but I’d highly recommend any episode of which he is a guest, particularly if you are a massive Dark Tower junkie like me!
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