Tales from the Gas Station: Volume One

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!

Definitely reads like a blog adapted to a book. The adaptation wasn't super great. Most of it was meandering and unrelated. The main character, though, was the weakest aspect, being completely unphased by anything that went on, and it was not replaced with sarcasm, wit, or even gross pleasantness like Odd Thomas. It's REALLY hard to take a horror book seriously when the main character doesn't show a shred of fear. Or any other emotion, for that matter.

All that being said, it was still a pleasant read. The author definitely has some good ideas and isn't too bad at communicating them. I think it's really cool that he got so much attention from a blog on Reddit that he got it turned into a book – a series, even. I may give the second book a chance, I hopes that my gripes would be ironed out if it was an intended book from the start.