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A musician driving to visit his dying grandmother stops at a gas station in the middle of the night, and makes the unwise decision to use its restroom. Next thing he knows, he's trapped inside it by someone who's come up with a lot of inventive ways to fuck with someone inside a locked room, from the outside of the room.
This was a very mixed bag.
A+ for the parts that are "I'm trapped in a gas station bathroom by a psycho:" it feels just like a nightmare, and is riveting.
B+ for Abe being Jewish, and how his bad relationship with his awful grandmother, a genocide survivor, comes into play in the story. I like that it's there but it could have gone deeper.
D for the irrelevant, annoying flashback storyline about Abe crushing on a woman who ends up dating another guy in the band.
D for story logic. Major elements of the story are just nonsensical.
So this random psycho prepped both a bulletproof vest and bags of blood under his shirt just in case if he pretended to be a shop employee and walked up to Abe, Abe would be so freaked out that he'd spin around and stab him in the chest, so the psycho could enjoy pretending to be dying to fuck with Abe some more?
And he stole all these bugs and snakes from a roadside exhibit just in case he could lock someone in the bathroom, get in the crawl space over it, and drop them on him?
And he literally painted the entire shop in blood and scattered body parts everywhere in the space of like 15 minutes without Abe hearing anything?
C- for the ending. I really dislike the stock horror ending of "Now that I've gone through a horrendous experience, I have become a psychopath myself." It's an annoying cliche that makes no sense. If it was supposed to be "my grandma became tough but also mean due to surviving a horrible event, and so did I," that makes even less sense. A very long-term trauma starting when you're a child that continues through early adulthood forms your personality in a way that a single very traumatic event that happens in adulthood and lasts a couple hours does not.
I very rarely say this, but this was a novella that should have been a novelette. The last chapter and the entire annoying subplot with the woman he failed to ask out should have been cut.
Also, I cannot believe I'm suggesting adding anti-Semitism, but an anti-Semitic psycho would have been really thematically on-point.
This was a lot of fun to read in paperback because of excellent graphic design elements.
Content warnings: Extreme gore, insects/spiders/snakes, insect/spider/snake harm, generational trauma.
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And he stole all these bugs and snakes from a roadside exhibit just in case he could lock someone in the bathroom, get in the crawl space over it, and drop them on him?
And he literally painted the entire shop in blood and scattered body parts everywhere in the space of like 15 minutes without Abe hearing anything?
Ah, Movie Serial Killer Magic Powers.
Also FFS re: the ending. Which strikes me as last-five-minutes-of-the-movie TWIST!!! logic. Magic contagion! Being a movie psychopath is catching, just like being a vampire/zombie/werewolf!
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I did adore that the googly eyes that the psycho made his mask out of appear on the pages in different places and google at you.
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Ohhhhhhhhhhh omg yep that's the logic!
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A distressing number of contemporary thrillers seem to end with the main character being a psycho.
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