From cannibalism to death to uppity hand puppets, Clay McLeod Chapman covers a wide variety of macabre subjects in his collection of twenty short stories titled “Rest Area.”

The title story tells of a father living at a rest area because he is searching for his daughter, Grace, after she disappears with the car keys months earlier. The man eats nothing but vending machine food, lives in his car, and shows visitors to the rest area a smudged and photocopied picture of his daughter, asking if they’ve seen her.

Following suit in a rather hilarious tone, “Chatterbox” explores the relationship between a ventriloquist and his wooden dummy, who is quite jealous of the fact that the ventriloquist has a wife, and scolds him accordingly.

Chapman takes a few breaks from his dark comedic style and writes seriously about war in “And Mothers Stepped Over Their Sons,” about hearing loss in “The Wheels on the Bus Go,” and disability in “Spoonfed.”

The darkest and most bizarre of the stories is “The Man Corn Triptych,” a three-part story that maps the tale of a corn farmer and his family slowly starving to death. The first part gives the father’s perspective, the second the daughter’s, and the third is from the perspective of a hunter who finds their bones years later.

My favorite story of the bunch was “Second Helping,” the story of a Bear Scout troop becoming a bit more occult and scary than the boys in “The Lord of The Flies.” The scouts end up cooking their scoutmaster over a fire and become a bizarre and cannibalistic cult that roams the woods eating campers and conducting gruesome rituals.

I was genuinely on the edge of my seat while reading this book. Chapman is an excellent storyteller, and manages to write about both very dark and funny – and very serious and emotional – issues, all with the same descriptive and spellbinding style.

The most macabre of the tales live up to the gruesome legacy of Edgar Allen Poe. Chapman shows off his diversity as a writer, however, when he examines tender issues with an almost philosophical wit.

The narrative style of many of the tales was that of a first-person, past-tense narrative. This gave it a very ghost-story-like feeling, and at times it was almost as if the speaker was really talking to me.

Chapman does a wonderful job captivating the reader from the very first line of each story, and he doesn’t falter throughout the entire book.

His writing style is tastefully descriptive, and he manages to create complex characters with just a small amount of writing.

The only part of the entire work that I found disappointing was the fact that he recycled some of the themes of the stories; “Second Helping” and “The Man Corn Triptych” were both about starvation, and “Michelle” and “Correspondence of Corpses” were of murderers who used similar methods to kill their victims.

“Rest Area” would definitely garner an “R” rating for many of the stories, so those who may be shocked or offended by explicit and perverse sexuality or graphic descriptions of violence may want to sit this one out.

The reader looking for a shocking, captivating, and surreal masterpiece will find just that in this cornucopia of simultaneously dark and sensitive tales.