One for the Road by Wesley Southard Book Review

Here's a 4 1/2 star read for my fellow weirdos!

One for the Road by Wesley Southard

Released June 15, 2019

Dark Fiction  |  Goodreads  |  Amazon 

Source: Received for Review Consideration

Only one more show and heavy metal guitarist Spencer Hesston can finally quit Rot in Hell. No more touring, no more fighting, and no more unwanted advances from the lead singer’s girlfriend. But instead of waking up the next day in their Midwestern hometown, the band finds themselves dazed and confused in an abandoned settlement in the middle of the desert, with no idea of how they got there.

Things are done a little differently out here: the trees have perverse urges, the spiders have human fingers, and every time they step outside the town transforms into a new hellish nightmare.

In this town anything is possible, except making it out in one piece…

Deadite Press is proud to present a new novella from Wesley Southard, a work of surreal horror sure to please fans of SILENT HILL, JACOB'S LADDER, and LOST HIGHWAY."

My 2 Cents For Free!

"A road trip through Hell in the spirit of Skipp & Spector's The Scream and Grady Hendrix's We Sold Our Souls. I loved it!" -Brian Keene, author of The Rising

This book is so very gross and boy does it ever move. I’m glad I picked it up over the weekend because I needed something fast paced and pitch black that I could finish quickly to help me feel like I accomplished something in my reading life and that’s what I found here, along with a little bit of the darkest of dark humor as a lovely bonus.

The story is presented as a journal written by a guy named Spencer who is sick to death of life on the road and even sicker of most of his douche-y band members. Some people aren’t cut out for life on the road and Spencer is one of them. After this last show he plans to ditch the band for good.

But his plans go awry when the tour bus makes an unexpected pit stop. Into HELL. Then the carnage begins and doesn’t ever let up as Spencer struggles to survive and maintain his sanity after he witnesses one atrocity after another. The fun here is in the monsters which are very imaginatively drawn (and in one case ridiculously and terrifyingly hilarious) and the gore. I wasn’t kidding when I said this book was gross. The author splatters your face and all of his characters with the nastiest of body fluids, some human and some not. The tree scenes will haunt me. Just ewwww and fantastically horrible. I don’t think I’ve been this horrified by a tree since I first watched The Evil Dead as a teen. This vision of hell is truly disturbing and I could not tear myself away from it.

Don’t expect deep characterization, lovable characters or a whole lot of answers. This isn’t that type of story. For that you’d need a much longer piece. I love answers, don’t get me wrong, but this ended in a way that allowed me to ponder things and make up my own ugly little scenario and that’s kind of fun too. One for the Road is like reading a nightmare and it was just what I needed this weekend even though there are a few images now imprinted on my brain that make me never want to sleep again, haha. I can’t wait to read more by this author.

Highly recommended to you twisted types.

4.5 out of 5