ARC Review: I Know A Place, by Nat Cassidy

Title: I Know A Place

Author: Nat Cassidy

Publisher: Shortwave Publishing

Genre: Horror

Date of Publication: May 5th, 2026 

Number of Pages: 472

See it on Goodreads: I Know A Place

*Disclaimer: I have received a free copy of this book via NetGalley. Thank you to Shortwave for providing me with this copy.

Summary

There are locations in this world where the light doesn’t seem to reach. Where, no matter how illuminated the place might be, shadows creep in too strongly to fight back.

A suspiciously empty gas station rest stop in the middle of the night, littered with googley eyes... A doctor’s office, where a bottle of booze and a tear-stained folder wait on the desk... A tech millionaire’s haunted kitchen... A Bible-quoting ventriloquist’s dingy apartment... A yoga retreat in the middle of the desert, silent except for the screaming...

These supernatural and sinister locations are your destination, and bestselling author Nat Cassidy will be your guide. Featuring the Bram Stoker Award–nominated, critically acclaimed novella Rest Stop (one of Esquire’s Best Horror Books of 2024), along with a number of other original short stories, some which have never been published before, I Know A Rest Stop and Other Dark Detours is a travelogue down twisting side streets and through alleyways where the darkness has eyes...and teeth.

Let’s hope you make it home in one piece—if the ghosts, gory visions, and splatterpunk nightmares don’t get you first.

Review - Next Stop: Your Darkest Fears

It is no secret that I've been on a horror kick since last year. So, you can imagine my thrill when I received an ARC of Nat Cassidy's upcoming book. I Know A Place is a horror short story collection featuring Rest Stop plus 12 more short stories. If you are familiar with Nat Cassidy, then you've probably heard of Rest Stop, a novella that was first published in 2024. Having not read it yet, I was eager to take the dark detours that this book promised to provide.

The best way to review this short story collection is by going through each story:

🩸 Rest Stop: I won't deny that I was really excited about reading this novella, which I already owned a digital copy of. In essence, we were following Abe, a musician, who is travelling at night. He decides to break his journey at a rest stop, but things don't go as planned. This novella was the perfect beginning for the collection, as it featured several hellish scenarios- and let me tell you, it did get under my skin. I wasn't the biggest fan of the religious turn of the story near the end, though. 

🩸 Meet-Cute #1: The Unluckiest Girl: This short story was about a chance meeting between a guy and a girl at a bar. It was as simple as that, until we had a name dropped that implied the horror that would follow. 

🩸 Generation: This story had one of the coolest concepts in this collection, and was definitely one of my top 3. In this one, we follow an ob/gyn in a dystopian future where women carry monsters instead of babies. I really liked that we were focusing on a single couple and how this ordeal affected them.

🩸 Nice: How could Christmas turn so wrong? A story that played with the idea of nice and naughty. I found this to be one of the most disturbing and gory stories of the collection.

🩸 The Art of What You Want: In the next one, we enter a haunted house, where the dead wife starts visiting her husband every day. However, the story takes an unhinged turn and I loved it. 

🩸 The Lunar Eclipse: This story perplexed me as I didn't spot any horror elements at all. However, it spoke directly to my heart, since the exploration of memory is one my favourite things an author can explore in a book. I loved it so much that I include it among the top stories in the collection. 

🩸 Laughlines: This short story was a gem! It was told through emails between a girl, her father with whom she had recently connected, and her best friend. Her father offers to pay for a trip to an English village and a visit to their ancestral castle. I couldn't get enough of the description of the castle, the tapestries, and the family's history. Definitely my favourite story in the collection. 

🩸 Run for Your Life: Have you watched the movie Yesterday? Now, imagine that as a horror short story. More precisely, it's about a young musician that discovers a way to travel back right before The Beatles could meet and form the band, and essentially takes their place. Of course, the story gets darker and darker, and the ending shocked me. 

🩸 Jubilee Juncture: Puppets can be pretty creepy, so a story about a deranged ventriloquist was only natural to be effective in making my skin crawl. I'm not going to spoil it, but you have to read it to understand how unhinged it really is.  

🩸 Come: The best way I can describe this story is The Ring meets It Follows. It was about a cursed sex tape involving a high school student and a teacher. The plot progressed exactly as I expected, but I loved the asexual representation and how it was actually used in the context of the story. 

🩸 Into the Life of Things: This short story was about a yoga cult gone wrong. However, we learn about this after the events, when a woman from the cult is murdered in a hospital. I enjoyed the dual timeline, and how the twist left me shocked at the end. 

🩸 Meet-Cute #2: The Scariest Thing: Just like Meet-Cute #1 this is a story of a guy and girl meeting at a bar. In this case though, the guy is super creepy and the ending left feeling a bit confused. 

🩸 A Fruiting Body: The most experimental story of them all. It was written like a play, intended to be read aloud by multiple people. Unfortunately, I read alone (even though I read it out loud). Maybe when I try it as the author recommends, it will click some more. 

All in all, this was a great short story collection. You will find something to love regardless of the type of horror you prefer. For my part, Generation, The Lunar Eclipse, and Laughlines were standouts. Keep an eye for it when it publishes on May 5th. 

Read more of my reviews here.