REST AREA

Remember when you were a kid telling stories around the camp fire? There was an inviolate law that you had to make them as ridiculous as possible, in both the plot and the telling. Clay McLeod Chapman takes us back to that time of overwritten and way overperformed scary stories, opening with a tale of a father searching for his daughter in the same rest area from which she disappeared months earlier. Unfortunately, the stories and performance progress from the scary to the strange and bizarre, including plots involving incest among the handicapped and cannibal Boy Scouts. Recycling the same two or three vocal characters in each story, Chapman's performance renders the horrific embarrassing and funny, while his writing deteriorates to the downright sick. R.P.L. (c) AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine [Published: OCT/ NOV 03]