left_adjoint reviewed Tales from the Gas Station: Volume One by Jack Townsend (Tales from the Gas Station, #1)
Fell really flat for me
2 stars
I'm a pretty big fan of creepypasta and r/nosleep artifacts as well as weird 4-th wall breaking fiction, have been for a long time, so I feel like I should have liked this but honestly it didn't do much for me. A lot of the dangled mystery was juuuust interesting enough that I didn't want to DNF the book but when we actually get to it it feels pretty unsatisfying.
I'd call the writing Whedon-esque but honestly for all of Joss's faults as a writer he knows he to let some dramatic tension happen without making a tonally weird joke about it. You kinda know not to get worried about anything that's happening because it will be resolved in some sorta lol-random way. Like it's one thing to be genre aware in writing or to have a main character in-on-the-joke but it's another when the narrative character in a horror …
I'm a pretty big fan of creepypasta and r/nosleep artifacts as well as weird 4-th wall breaking fiction, have been for a long time, so I feel like I should have liked this but honestly it didn't do much for me. A lot of the dangled mystery was juuuust interesting enough that I didn't want to DNF the book but when we actually get to it it feels pretty unsatisfying.
I'd call the writing Whedon-esque but honestly for all of Joss's faults as a writer he knows he to let some dramatic tension happen without making a tonally weird joke about it. You kinda know not to get worried about anything that's happening because it will be resolved in some sorta lol-random way. Like it's one thing to be genre aware in writing or to have a main character in-on-the-joke but it's another when the narrative character in a horror story, even a comedic one, almost never feels tension or emotions other than annoyance that he wants to get back to reading.
But with all that said I still kinda want to know what happens in the next book so clearly he's doing some things right!
