Rating:

“We’re all just biding our time before we break, aren’t we? This is just the rest stop.”

Author: Nat Cassidy

Abe keeps making excuses to avoid being at his grandmother’s death bed. After all, his grandmother is a terrifying, cruel woman who spent her days populating his childhood with nightmare stories. She always hated him. She always wanted to steal his childhood and replace it with the darker stuff of life. No, Abe doesn’t want to go.

So, he is somewhat surprised to find himself driving down a lonely highway, late at night, finally guilted into the visit, hoping that he has left too late. What’s really eating at his mind is the love of a girl he can’t have – a girl his best friend went ahead and stole. That, and he needs a bathroom.

This is the state of mind Abe finds himself in when he’s trapped in a dirty gas station bathroom with all manner of snakes and bugs and creeping horrors reigning down on him in the cramped room. Outside, there is blood, googly eyes, and a maniac. Maybe he should have listened to his grandmother’s horrifying stories. Maybe he’d have learned to survive – maybe that’s what she was trying to teach him? Maybe he’d at least have an idea of what is happening here.

And that’s the premise of Rest Stop, a 160-page novella that takes the ordinary (a bathroom break on the highway) and turns it into the perverse and the terrifying. The description made me want to read it, and I am obsessed with author Nat Cassidy’s novel Mary and When the Wolf Comes Home. I was still in the afterglow of Wolf when I picked up this story.

The problem is, Cassidy does work best in novel length format. He brings the gore and the action plenty, but he is above all an author of the heart and mind. His stories are more than gore splats. They’re about psychology and long-held trauma (generational in this case), and his ruminations need a place to expand and grow their own insidious fruit. A novella is just a little too short for what Rest Stop wants to do here, especially as we speed toward a slightly confusing conclusion.

Image by Terk Olvera from Pixabay

First – we didn’t need the entire love-lost angle. The point is that Abe is the kind of guy who sits on the sidelines, misses his chances, and lets life go by. He’s not a risk-taker by nature, and so this little horror side quest is especially brutal for him.  Honestly, the girl and the best friend and their relationship don’t even really matter for the story, yet they take up a lot of page space.

The Jewish grandmother on the other hand, with her holocaust stories, deserved much more page space. We mostly just get that she is a meanie, but she’s ultimately supposed to be more. She’s not benevolent, but there are hints of a tough love nature, a desire to pass down survival to her children and grandchildren. However, these are more things that are stated than shown. We got the point, but we wanted to get there organically, instead of having the short peace just tell us that mean old grandma had a point, and good old Abe better listen now.

By the end, it’s not entirely obvious what this story is trying to say. We know Cassidy, and we know that the ending isn’t just about shock or twists. There’s a moral there – even if it is a decaying one filled with broken bones and shattered hearts. I’m just not sure what it is. We become what we fear? To survive we must become killers? Survival isn’t enough, because trauma can destroy worse than a psychotic killer? Creepy vans are fun? Serial killers gotta start somewhere? I honestly have no idea. I liked the ending, but I have no idea what it means.

Still, even though Rest Stop isn’t perfect, it’s got some beautifully surreal moments. It’s that intoxicating mixture of fever dream and horror with your traditional jump scares (big spiders anyone) and a creative antagonist (googly eyed / mirror man killer is brilliant and terrifying). Recommended.

– Frances Carden

Follow my reviews on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/xombie_mistress

Follow my reviews on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/FrancesReviews

Frances Carden
Latest posts by Frances Carden (see all)