REST STOP

A metalhead bassist’s will to live is tested at an eerie rest stop in the middle of the night, in Cassidy’s horror novella.

Abe is a slightly insecure, nebbishy musician, who plays bass guitar and sings for an obscure death-metal band. When his grandmother Bobbe has a stroke, he decides to schedule a practice with his band miles away so they can get some rehearsal time in before an upcoming gig and he can be by Bobbe’s side in the hospital. He pulls into a rest stop on the way but discovers that—despite seeing a few cars in the parking lot—the entire place is empty. Alarm bells go off, but he needs to use the bathroom. When he tries to leave the bathroom, he discovers that the door’s been jammed…or locked. When creatures start emerging from the air vent in the ceiling—including a large hairy spider, writhing insects, and more—he soon realizes that something foul is at play; there was a reason the rest stop was empty, and he will have to struggle to make it out of the bathroom alive. Cassidy’s tense, heart-pounding thriller moves easily from the freaky to the gory. (Ominous notes, with letters clipped from candy wrappers, are slipped under the door, making the mundane feel nightmarish.) The author’s prose is brisk, clean, sometimes funny, sometimes earnest, and often memorably horrifying (a surface of “[f]athomless, black holes, honeycombed in row upon row across what should be [a] stranger’s face” stands out as a particularly unsettling description). There are moments when Cassidy tries to make the horror cut deeper by evoking the intergenerational violence and antisemitism Bobbe once faced; these elements aren’t as developed or integrated into the rest of the story as they should be. The novella works best when it simply layers fright after fright, trapping the reader in a gnarly bathroom with creepy crawlies coming in and a possible serial killer on the other side of the door.

A blood-soaked freakout that does for gas stations what Jaws did for beaches.