Last month, I reviewed Rebekah McKendry’s Glorious, a movie about a man who confronts cosmic forces from within the confines of a roadside restroom. Maybe bathroom horror has infiltrated the Zeitgeist of the past few years because now I’m discussing Nat Cassidy’s Rest Stop (2024), a novella that also leverages the generative power of a small stall against a sweeping backdrop. Here, the larger forces aren’t alien but historical: On the surface, Cassidy’s rest stop is a bathroom in a gas station, but symbolically, it represents a particular period in American history, an era of relative peace following the World Wars that may now be coming to a close. Skillfully moving between the mundane and metaphorical sides of the novella’s setting, Cassidy delivers weighty and often grim insights with subtlety and humor. Oh, and with snakes and gore, too! In this gap between Nestlings (2023), his brooding tour de force, and When the Wolf Comes Home, his much-anticipated take on lycanthropy, Cassidy thrives under the constraints of the novella’s shorter form, demonstrating his talent for creative and economical dialogue and exposition. While he can make great use of extra pages–his previous work proves it–he doesn’t need a lot of space to give us a compelling narrative with big ideas and memorable characters. Nor does he need the maneuvering room of a novel to unpack his eclectic horror aesthetic. From creepy crawly thrills to a stylized set piece that would fit in an Argento film, this novella has something for every genre fan. 

On the surface, the story of Rest Stop is deceptively simple. Though he should be practicing for an upcoming gig, musician Abe is on a late-night road trip to the death bed of his grandmother, Bobbe, a shrewish woman whom he hates. Thinking about their complicated relationship, his death metal band, and his recent romantic disappointment, he passes a roadside attraction, featuring spiders and snakes, before pulling into a gas station. Despite the cars in the lot, the building is eerily empty and, when he visits the bathroom, someone on the other side of the door locks him in. Thus begins a night of torment and terror.

With a few exceptions, the book focuses on one man in one room for one night, a limited subject, place, and time that seems appropriate for a novella, a format which can curb complicated storytelling. But Cassidy is a master of economy. His strategic use of dialogue turns the novella into a concertina, a layered structure that expands outward to include a myriad of characters and contexts. Before Abe stops at the gas station, he has a brief exchange with his older brother that does an astonishing amount of expositional work. In these few pages, Cassidy establishes Abe’s selfishness, his sibling’s protectiveness, their fraught connection with Bobbe, and their ambivalent identification with Jewish culture. Not a single word is wasted, and yet it all feels incredibly easy and natural. This interaction violates the unities I’ve described because it’s conducted through a cell phone with another human being. I bring it up, though, because it introduces a rich style of discourse that only gets better when Abe, alone in his bathroom prison, holds imaginary conversations with, among others, his grandmother. Channeling Bobbe’s voice, he recreates the toxic dynamic that characterized their relationship, while gesturing toward the religious and generational tensions that shaped their psyches. In a single character, Cassidy manages to give us a full cast and a surprising amount of historical reach.

Through heated dialogue with his grandmother’s persona, Abe arrives at one of the closely related paradoxes which lie at the heart of the book. The bathroom seems to be the safest place in the world: The space is small and windowless; the only door is locked and, without a sledgehammer, the tiled walls would be difficult to breach. The irony here is that the features guaranteeing his security are also the ones that make him defenseless against the capricious killer dropping dangerous things through the ceiling vent. His safety is that of a fish in a barrel with a drunken gunman taking shots at the bilge. In the same way that the circling fish is already a bloated floater, Abe, with his murder seemingly a foregone conclusion, is as good as a corpse. To use his coinage, he’s been “Schrodinger-ized” and, like the hypothetical cat in the famous thought experiment, exists in two contradictory states at the same time. At once safe and vulnerable, alive and dead, Abe–like all of us–holds impossibilities in a delicate tension within himself, and Cassidy manages to reveal these brain-taxing truths through the metaphor of a grimy bathroom. That’s a feat.

On the level of plot, Abe’s delirious recognition of life’s absurdity helps sustain him through a traumatic situation. But more significantly, these paradoxes have dark correspondences beyond the rest stop and in the broader sweep of history. Cassidy signals his more serious concerns early on through Abe’s grandmother. To Bobbe, a jewish woman, who grew up in Poland during WWII, Abe has always represented a detestable American softness, the product of an easy life in a country of peace and plenty. But Cassidy complicates the meaning of peace by setting Rest Stop in the summer of 2016. The dread of Trump’s imminent reign infects the relatively contained action of the book with larger meaning: While Abe may seem safe and comfortable in the beginning of the story, the reality is that he’s under threat before ever stepping foot into the bathroom. He may distract himself in the car with Yacht Rock, the music of wealth and carefree leisure, but he–along with the rest of the country–are marching toward fascism and the threat of political violence. In the same way that safety means vulnerability and life means death, the peace that has characterized Abe’s generation is just a blip on an endless timeline of wars. It is always already over or may as well be.

Historical forces and trends, Cassidy suggests, move ineluctably toward conflict. This period of relative peace that Americans have enjoyed–“this time between the great wars and whatever’s coming next”–is an exception to the rule. It is a “rest stop” along an endless road of cruelty and carnage (86). That’s a bleak message, and Cassidy doesn’t attempt to lighten it with a conventional silver lining like “good will triumph over evil.” What he offers instead is a lesson about gratitude and endurance. We are lucky to have lived during an interruption, but we can’t escape a return to history’s regularly scheduled programming. With just weeks before the start of Trump’s second term, I feel grateful for the past and resigned to whatever’s on the way.

Whew, that sounds heavy! But all of the weighty ideas in Rest Stop are leavened with humor! No matter how dark they are, Abe’s observations and reactions are somehow funny; and the dialogues taking place in his head often have great comic pacing. He and the persona of his bandmate, Ty, go back and forth like they’re in an entertaining ‘90s movie, and Bobbe’s acerbity cuts the dude vibe perfectly. 

Good at writing comedy, Cassidy is also a virtuoso of gore who moves seamlessly through different registers of horror. In an age of weekly mass murders, a multiple fatality incident at a gas station sounds almost too close to home to be amusing. But for those who enjoy realistic and true-crime violence, it will definitely give you that sought-after stomach-dropping sense of dread. And it works for me, too. When there are lungs draped over the coffee maker and ice scrapers jammed turkey-tail style into someone’s ass, then horror fans like me, who don’t love the hard stuff, know that it’s ok to laugh. The gore is so over-the-top that, at points, it veers into the artistic. Consider the scene when Abe steps out of the bathroom: With wall-to-wall blood gleaming vinyl red under fluorescent lights, the imagery is pure Argento, and I adore the Giallo aesthetic. There’s also loads of insect horror so, if you suffer from entomophobia and like to poke your fears with a sharp stick, then this book’s for you!

I’ve come up with lots of reasons why you should read Rest Stop, but my promotion of this book is ultimately selfish. When Abe roars along to the Doobie Brother’s “What a Fool Believes,” I feel truly seen. I’ve always called Michael McDonald “cotton mouth” because it sounds like he’s bellowing through a mouth full of batting. Like Abe, I can’t make out the full lyrics–only the vowels–but that doesn’t stop me from singing along!