# Tales from the Gas Station: Volume One

By Jack Townsend · Tales from the Gas Station, book 1

Profile: https://hahafiction.com/books/tales-from-the-gas-station-volume-one-ee048831/

Jack works overnight at a gas station where creatures and sinister visitors keep interrupting the shift. He starts an online journal about the place, attracts unwanted attention and tries to stay clear of a growing supernatural threat to the town.

## What makes it funny?

Jack has a ghostly cowboy in the bathroom and mutant raccoons to deal with, yet treats fighting monsters as work beyond his pay grade. A cult’s plan to reduce suffering by destroying the world adds another absurd problem to the shift.

### The comedy at work

Townsend puts impossible dangers inside the routines of a retail job. Jack’s unreliable account and reluctance to become a hero let him respond to cosmic threats with the priorities of someone who mainly wants to be comfortable.

### Try this if…

Readers who enjoy supernatural strangeness delivered with a dry voice may find the combination appealing, especially when the narrator resists taking charge.

### Good to know

Violence and a terminal insomnia condition give the jokes a darker context. The novel expands the original online stories, and the author says newcomers can follow it without reading the blog.

## What to expect

- Genre: Horror
- On the shelf: Cosmic horror
- Kind of humor: Absurdism · Dark comedy · Dry wit
- Format: Novel
- Length: 326 pages
- Audiobook: 8 hr 31 min
- Published: 2018

## A few distinguishing details

- A gas-station clerk confronting cosmic horror on a retail wage
- An online journal that attracts the wrong attention

## Sources & further reading

- Author commentary: [Author publication notes](https://www.gasstationjack.com/post/jack-s-first-ever-newsletter)
- Author commentary: [Author book description](https://www.gasstationjack.com/the-book)
- Book information: [Print edition information](https://books.google.com/books?id=6ndQvQEACAAJ)
- Review: [Cat Voleur review](https://thepickybookworm.com/tales-from-the-gas-station-volume-one)
- Book information: [Audiobook edition](https://books.apple.com/us/audiobook/tales-from-the-gas-station-volume-one-unabridged/id1692661005)