Unquiet
Things

Rest Stop is Nat Cassidy doing something a little different, or at least it felt that way to me. Abe is driving through the night to visit his dying grandmother (whom he resents) and stops at a gas station to use the bathroom. He gets locked in. There’s a masked man outside. There are spiders and snakes crawling down the walls inside. There are notes being slipped under the door. His grandmother’s voice keeps running through his head, all her stories about Jewish trauma and suffering, all the ways she made him feel small. The whole thing is claustrophobic and visceral and moves at a breakneck pace, and Abe talks to himself constantly in a way that some people apparently found annoying but I thought worked perfectly for someone losing their mind in a gas station bathroom at 3am.

People keep calling this “extreme horror” and I don’t know about that. It’s gory, sure. There’s a lot of blood and some genuinely upsetting body horror. But it doesn’t feel like it’s trying to punish you the way actual extreme horror does. It felt more like Cassidy was having fun in the playground of his genre, seeing how much weirdness and violence and dark humor he could pack into 160 pages. Some reviewers found it cringe or too existential or didn’t understand the ending, and I get all of that. It’s definitely weird. But I had a blast with it. It’s quick and wacky and unhinged in ways I wasn’t quite expecting from him. This man could write about possessed dental equipment or a haunted Burger King drive-thru or demonic hitchhikers on the Garden State Parkway, and I’d be first in line for it, every single time.