Hey there, Readers! Welcome back to our monthly literary outing. We’re returning to our Indie roots today with the insomnia-driven tale of gas Station Jack and his wacky work environment.
As someone who dealt with terrible insomnia in my teenage years and who still dabbles in it even now… this book spoke to me on a weird level. An enjoyable but “Oh man – been there.” kind of level.
So, pour yourself a cup of your strongest coffee and let Jack sell you a garden gnome or two.
Book Stats
- Author: Jack Townsend.
Formats: Paperback, Hardcover, Kindle, and Audible.
Price: $14.66 for Paperback, $25.99 for Hardcover, $3.99 for the Kindle and $17.46 for Audible, or one Credit on Audible.
Length: 285 pages or 8 hours 31 minutes in audio format.
Narrator: MrCreepyPasta.
Number of books in the series: 4 at the time of writing and a bunch of supplementary material.
Basic Premise
Out there in America’s forgotten spaces, between wilderness and sort-of civilization, you’ll find them. Little independently owned gas stations that will fill you up, sell you generic snacks, let you use the bathroom if you don’t mind a weird cowboy dancing around in there and they’ll even let you use the phone for a very reasonable 25 cents a minute. Jack’s gas station is a little different, though. I mean, there’s the hand plants that grow out back by the dumpsters. The randomly placed and ever increasing number of garden gnomes. The hilariously either inbred or mutated raccoons. That’s not even the start of it though – and the smell! Oh the smell.
In short, it’s not exactly the kind of place OSHA looks at super carefully.
Jack works there as a clerk. He takes the night shift mostly. See, he has a condition that makes this super easy… Jack doesn’t sleep. At all. And it’s killing him slowly. His condition is apparently genetic and not very well understood so he gets free psychiatric care and his body will be dissected and studied once he finally does pass on. (Something to look forward to, I guess.) He’s declining cognitively, always looks like crap and treats even the strangest things in his life as kind of hum-drum.
Like when his best friend Antonio, who also works at the gas station, confides in him that he has the body of a local politician in the trunk of his car. Which is, honestly, impossible because Jack saw him alive and mostly well after the fact.
Anyway, back to the psychiatric care. Jack’s head-shrinker says it would be a good idea for jack to keep a journal. Write down a page every day noting significant events to help Jack remember what’s going on in his life. Jack agrees to do it but when out buying the journal, the guy at the bookstore suggests doing it as a blog instead. Jack gets the journal to make notes but the main bulk of his writing is done on a website where he can keep track of how many folks are reading. It doesn’t take him too long to amass something of a cult following as everything that Jack transcribes is kind of wild…
But how much of it is true and how much of it is in Jack’s own head? Because seeing it out there in black
and white? Not a lot of it makes sense. Especially being that Antonio has killed the same local politician
several times, now.
And when he starts hearing whispers about a dark god living under the gas station? How much of that is real and how much of that is the onset of paranoia bought about by his condition?
You’ll have to read to find out!
My Take
This is a really interesting book. As mentioned in the preamble, I’ve personally dealt with insomnia and a lot of this book rings really true to me. Conversations I swore happened that no-one else remembers. (That’s a rough one.) Spotting weird stuff then realizing it’s in my head and that’s all. The loss of memory and time. It’s all here. I would be completely surprised if the author didn’t have personal experience with long-term sleep loss or at the very least they must have done a lot of research. This odd, nightmarish quality of the narrative as told by Jack was really compelling and kept me wondering till the very end how much of it’s real and how much of it is delusion; how much of it is both? Where do they intersect and by how much? Sleeplessness is hard enough to navigate when your life is completely regular and predictable let alone when dark forces are slowly converging on your workplace.
Those dark forces, by the way? Wonderful. Not every strange occurrence in the book is explained – one hilarious scene towards the end points this out in a manner that’s as stark as it is entertaining – but this is volume one of four so there’s time.
Two things I want to mention! The book series has a great website Here! It’s active and the author seems to be involved in a fair few live events and stuff, so, if that’s your bag? Please check it out! Also! The version I am reviewing is the original, single narrator version but a newer, cinematic version is available Here! This one is a version with full voice casting and a score. I haven’t listened to it yet but I fully intend to as I really did enjoy the story and can only imagine it’s a lot of fun when fully acted.
The narrator for the version I listened to is MrCreepyPasta. The audio quality fluctuates a little and every so often you hear some background noise of the narrator shifting in his seat. That kind of thing. It’s not as slick of a production as many other audiobooks and I LOVE IT. I want to make this really clear – that’s not a criticism and here’s why; this book literally feels like you’re sitting down listening to that one weird buddy we all have telling you a weird anecdote. It’s perfect for a story like this.
So, this is another recommended read from me. Definitely better value than a $5.99 garden gnome.
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