Welcome back, Readers! As summer comes to an end and spooky season approaches, we turn our To Be Read piles over like mounds of fresh grave dirt, looking for the creepy. For the macabre. For the spine-tingling and scary and sometimes silly.
“But Jim!” I hear you say! “It isn’t even October, let alone Halloween!”
Never let it be said that I’m one to wait for the spirit to take me! And this book is equal parts horror and comedy so a nice easy ‘In’ to the tales of fear and fright I plan to bring you once we enter Fall proper. This is the second in a four book series by Jack Townsend. We Spotlighted book 1 Here and it was one I absolutely, thoroughly enjoyed; can Gas Station Jack keep me enthralled with his stories about night shift clerking in one of America’s forgotten spaces?
Grab some coffee and a shovel and we’ll find out together!
Obviously, some spoilers for Book 1 are ahead so if you haven’t read it, please go do so!
Book Stats
- Author: Jack Townsend.
Formats: Paperback, Kindle, and Audible.
Price: $16.99 for Paperback, $7.99 for the Kindle and $17.46 for Audible, or one Credit on Audible.
Length: 347 pages or 9 hours and 22 minutes in audio format.
Narrator: Jon Grilz is the primary narrator, plus Jack’s voice but the theatrical version I’m reviewing has a full cast. Unfortunately, I can’t find a comprehensive list of the vocal talent except, after some googling, to say that Donald Glover does not voice himself. There is also a version available narrated by MrCreepyPastawho has narrated all the books in this series, but I have not listened to his version yet.
Number of books in the series: Four plus a website filled with supplimentary material.
Basic Premise
Jack is a clerk at a gas station on the outskirts of a weird little town. A town where hunting is the primary passtime shared by locals. A town that borders on woods that are filled with things most people ignore purposefully. A town that is under some kind of strange, Russian surveillance… but I’m getting ahead of myself.
The gas station is home to an ever larger cadre of garden gnomes, crazed raccoons, a fox lady, a murderous liar of a hobo, a cowboy who dances in the bathroom and used to be the residence of an eldritch god-monster. But that last one is sort of taken care of. It’s also the primary place you can find Gas Station Jack! He has a genetic condition that just won’t let him go to sleep. It’s slowly killing him, but it DOES come in handy for covering the majority of night shift work required by the job.
Jack’s condition allows for him tio have free psychiatric care and one of the things he was instructed to do is journal. That’s what we’re reading with this book; a series of journal entries documenting everything that goes on in an average day in Jack’s life.
Like the moment he realizes that someone who very much wants to hurt him, someone he thought was dead at the hands of another is actually still alive and still very much interested in him! Spencer Middleton has somehow returned from having his throat slit and is back in town.
Also, due to the drink cases being broken, Jerry (One of Jack’s co-workers.) is made aware that the gas station itself is wired in such a fashion as to be a giant radio receiver and there’s a man with a Russian accent vocally documenting everything that goes on in town. From people dying to cats giving birth to car accidents and more.
This gives jack and Jerry a heads-up on a lot of the weird happenings going on in their area and as they get drawn deeper into the weird goings-on, it’s obvious that there’s a new dark god on the horizon and it may well just be that gas station crew that’s this world’s last line of defense.
Can our rag-tag group of clerks and other assorted townspeople prevent a pain obsessed empathic creature of the abyss from casting our world into a hellish nightmarescape of agony?
Maybe. You’ll have to read to find out.
My Take
This is another great entry in the series. I will say that it has more loose ends than the prior book and does leave a few plot threads hanging in mid-air. It’s only book two of four, though, so I really think a lot more will become clear as the series goes on. It does feel like our primary antagonistic force is introduced into the story later and less of the prior goings-on tie back into it.
When looking at the first book I felt a weird kinship with Jack simply because I’ve dealt with pretty bad insomnia before. That is still true in this book, though, his sleeplessness, having been established, is less at the forefront of the story. His experiences with missing time, though, do turn up at least one surprise and we do have to question the things he sees, hears and experiences a lot more as his time spent sleepless stretches ever further out. He is proven to be at least somewhat of an unreliable narrator later in the story and it definitely makes figuring out what’s real and what’s not that much more intriguing!
Jerry really gets a chance to shine in this book and quickly become one of my favorite characters. He’s the last surviving member of a cult that drank the kool aid and… well. There’s a reason he’s the last one. He just missed out on the gathering where they all… uh. Transcended, let’s say. He and Jack work really well together, with Jerry’s boundless enthusiasm and Jack’s sleepless apathy counterbalancing one another pretty well, though, Jerry tends to take the lead a lot.
The theatrical version is read by a full cast and they all do great jobs! I’m looking forward to listening to the version read by MrCreepyPasta as well. I had a great fondness for his reading of book one.
All in all, if you’re looking for a way to warm up those skeletons and get into the spirit of the Halloween season, this is a perfect tome to get you there!
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