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:
After the wacky insanity of Mary and the genuine horror of Nestlings, I can say that I am a certified Nat Cassidy fan, so when Shortwave, a press that rarely misses, announced they were putting out a Nat Cassidy novella, and that it was a bloody, slashery romp, I jumped.
At first I wasn’t too sure. Abe will be familiar to readers of Nestlings: a rather unassuming, musical guy who sees himself as “nice,” but is harboring all kinds of resentments and maybe his own share of darkness. Most of the opening pages are filled with his musings on his best friend’s girl, when he should be thinking about his dying grandmother.
The book doesn’t take long to get going, as Abe enters a gas station in the wee hours, only to find it apparently empty. But once he enters the bathroom, things start to get real weird real fast.
There’s a kind of cartoonishness to what follows, and it’s clear that Cassidy is having a great time, and we have a great time with him, even if we’re maybe rolling our eyes a bit at Saw-like traps and drawn out psychological warfare, all while stuck in a tiny, filthy, gas station bathroom.
Outside the bathroom, things aren’t just wild, they’re incredibly bloody, and we see Cassidy playing with a different type of horror, really leaning into the bloody violence in a way his previous novels have only gestured toward.
What isn’t surprising is that there’s a lot more going on here than a simple splatterpunk workout. Over the course of Abe’s ordeal, he has time to meditate on the nature/existence of God, his attitudes toward his Jewishness, his relationship with his terrifyingly gruff grandmother, his friendships, his love life, and the nature of horror itself. What emerges is a character study of a young man who is stuck, whose whole life has become an extended rest stop along life’s highway, and it’s this deftly drawn character work that elevates Rest Stop above its own splatter and gore.
Is Rest Stop operating at the same level as the novels? Not at all, but it is doing what it sets out to do with remarkable skill and heart, and it’s exciting to watch a gifted writer color outside the lines a bit, especially when there’s so very much red on the page.
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