Rest Stop by Nat Cassidy: Review by Gabino Iglesias

April 3, 2025March 25, 2025 locusmag 0 Comments Gabino Iglesias, horror

Rest Stop, Nat Cassidy (Shortwave 978-1-95956-536-9, $13.99, 160pp, tp) October 2024. Cover by Alan Lastufka.

When done right, there’s nothing like a novella: short, fast, engaging, and easy to devour. Nat Cassidy’s Rest Stop brings all of that and more to the table. Besides being fast and engaging, it’s also weird, intense, and deeper than it seems on the surface.

A young vocalist and bass player named Abe is on the road with a lot on his mind. He stops at a gas station to use their bathroom, but before he can register what’s happening, he finds himself locked inside the small restroom. That’s when the nightmare really starts. Encounters with deadly animals someone is putting into the bathroom using a vent and bodies littering the gas station are just the beginning. To make matters worse, Abe, who isn’t a brave or physically imposing person, must endure his captivity and the bloody mayhem that follows while listening to his strict, rough grandmother in his head.

Cassidy, the author of Mary: An Awakening of Terror, Nestlings, and the upcoming When the Wolf Comes Home, has been making a name for himself in horror for the past few years. Rest Stop is unlike those novels in terms of length and approach, but it’s as good as anything the author has put out in the past. Cassidy goes deep into physical horror – being trapped, a deadly snake, brutalized corpses, fights, etc – but he does it while also turning up the heat in terms of psychological horror. The combination works really well here, and the pacing of the book makes it all go by in no time, leaving us at once satisfied and wanting more, which is one of the best things a book can do.

Horror, comedy, and the absurd collide in Rest Stop, and it’s clear that they do so because Cassidy wanted them to. Yes, this is a book that gets very weird and very dark, but the author is always in control and always pulls the narrative back into place after the strangeness hits a high point. If you like your horror smart and strange, this one is for you.

Besides being a great addition to Cassidy’s catalog, this book is the same thing for Shortwave Publishing: one more good book among other good books. If you’re looking for unique speculative fiction, check out what they’re doing. Cassidy’s book is a perfect place to start.

Gabino Iglesias is a writer, journalist, professor, and book reviewer living in Austin TX. He is the author of Zero Saints and Coyote Songs and the editor of Both Sides. His work has been nominated to the Bram Stoker and Locus Awards and won the Wonderland Book Award for Best Novel in 2019. His short stories have appeared in a plethora of anthologies and his non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and CrimeReads. His work has been published in five languages, optioned for film, and praised by authors as diverse as Roxane Gay, David Joy, Jerry Stahl, and Meg Gardiner. His reviews appear regularly in places like NPR, Publishers Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle, Criminal Element, Mystery Tribune, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other print and online venues. He’s been a juror for the Shirley Jackson Awards twice and has judged the PANK Big Book Contest, the Splatterpunk Awards, and the Newfound Prose Prize. He teaches creative writing at Southern New Hampshire University’s online MFA program. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.

This review and more like it in the March 2025 issue of Locus.

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