Whisper House Press

Book: Rest Stop

Author: Nat Cassidy

Publisher: Shortwave Publishing

Publication Date: October 15, 2024

Length: ~29k words

Capone’s Rating: 4 of 5 ⭐s

Comedians sometimes imply that a jumpscare in a book is a concept both hilarious and impossible. But here we have a case in point, digestible in one sitting—or at one highway stopover—of a book that does the job in several places. So writers: Study up. Readers: Prepare yourselves. My family don’t often hear me make noises of disgust expressing ick-factor willies, but they heard it all during the afternoon when I read Nat Cassidy’s Rest Stop from Shortwave Publishing.

I’ll point this out about my taste as a reader (not how I taste but of my taste): I do not chase books in search of gross outs, scares, or for bodily discomfiture. In fact, a book that does these things has to do a lot else besides to capture my interest. And Cassidy has achieved both in the same one-two knock on the noggin.

Imagine arriving late at night to a gas station and convenience store combo on a lonely stretch of highway thinking: Hostess cakes (I’m likely to be thinking Tastykake), a urinal, and a stretch of the ‘ol back and legs. The premise of Rest Stop opens with that and proceeds to play out what horrors might await inside what we’d pray would serve as respite for the weary traveler.

Cassidy’s work has caught my eye lately. Nestlings, an explicitly Jewish take on vampire horror, was a show-stopper for me; I listened to it last month on audiobook, and I got through it in two days—it was all I had being fed into my brain in terms of creative content for those days, and I loved it. Mother is up next on my Nat Cassidy (whom I keep wanting to call Neal Cassady—he, the inspiration for Karuac’s Dean Moriarity in his road trip novel On the Road) reading list. Rest Stop, Cassidy explains in an afterword, was drafted between those two full-length novels. This work of long fiction (but still shorter than a novel) has been recognized by the Horror Writers Association for its excellence—it was a final nominee for a Bram Stoker Award in its category. You should take an afternoon to read it. Maybe read it twice.

Character-arc-but-not-plot-spoilers ahead:

I appreciate novels infused with the author’s own processing of what we might think of as identity reckoning. I tend (without much choice in the matter) to write characters who can’t seem to help existing and seeing the world from the perspective of one on the Autism spectrum. And although I write Jewish characters and am intimately connected with Jewish communities both in Utah and in East Pittsburgh, I am not Jewish and don’t pretend to know what it is to struggle with a Jewish identify in a society that’s absolutely fucking scary in a lot of ways. How is that identity explored in Rest Stop? Well, it is. In it, our protagonist comes to some terms with his abandonment of even the cultural accoutrements of Jewishness.

Without divulging the plot points, I’ll offer this food for thought. You might want to look out for the character arc traceable along these lines: He is a bad Jew and can’t help but to imagine pretty much continuously his family’s judgment of his abandonment of that faith; he comes to believe he needs something like a god; he realizes god is a fucking maniac who’s not to be trusted; he assimilates into the culture that so threatened him and becomes a part of that culture of threat. That’s how I read it, anyway. And it made me think about this while delivering thrills. That’s a pretty impressive thing for Cassidy to have done with these plot beats. So those looking for scares and gross outs and knife-wielding maniacs: This book is for you. For those ISO self-aware, speculative, cultural thought experiments: This book is for you, too.

Book friends, I’d love to hear your take on this book when you’ve read it.