(Editor’s note: SHORT SHOTS is an occasional feature where I review horror short stories.)
A woman flees with her young daughter from an abusive husband and ends up at a roadside diner somewhere in Montana. However, the paranoid fear of the husband finding her and taking their daughter may not be the worst danger she faces tonight.
That’s the plot of “Play Time,” the first of 10 tales in the horror collection Evil by Emmy award-winning documentary filmmaker Kevin Bachar. Released in 2025, Evil is the first entry in Bachar’s Library of Terror series. Bachar is an excellent storyteller. His writing style is efficient and straightforward, grounding his horror fiction in reality even when events spiral out of control.
The short story “Play Time” is packed with domestic dread and suspense as the mother Michelle drives her daughter Cassie across the country to find sanctuary at her aunt’s house in Idaho. Her husband Carl, fresh out of prison and unlikely to honor a restraining order, forces Michelle to plan her escape six months in advance.
We meet Michelle as she’s driving the back roads on a twisty route to throw Carl off her trail just in case he’s following her. When Michelle and 10-year-old Cassie spy a neon sign for Billy’s Best Burgers, Cassie chants, “onion rings, onion rings, onion rings,” and convinces Michelle to turn into the parking lot. Billy’s Best Burgers is the classic greasy spoon, complete with a sandpaper-voiced older waitress named Darlene.
Cassie immediately notices the indoor play area at the restaurant, which includes a series of tubes that converge into a slide that shoot you into a ball pit. It promises fun for Cassie, while she waits for her food.
But the diner makes Michelle feel apprehensive. Bachar subtly conveys that underlying unease via the setting and the character interaction.
Some examples? The restaurant’s neon sign “was so bright red that it bathed everything within 100 feet in a ruby shadow.” The diner’s indoor lighting casts “a faded brown sheen that favored dark corners.” Michelle realizes “that there were no other customers at Billy’s.” The waitress Darlene is the only employee in the diner and says, “You got thirty minutes to order and eat, and then I’m shutting her down.”
These observations don’t appear menacing on the surface, but they build an atmosphere of dread and set the table for the horror to come.
The title “Play Time” starts taking on a darker double meaning when Cassie runs to the indoor play area, crawls into a tunnel, and hears breathing behind her – from inside the tunnel. Then, Michelle asks Darlene to keep an eye on her daughter while she goes to the restroom. It’s the perfect cinematic moment, the one where you’d start talking to the screen if “Play Time” was a movie.
Bachar takes a couple of big narrative swings in the climax of “Play Time” – and nails both of them. The author turns a quick stop for onion rings at a roadside burger joint into a night of escalating terror for mother and daughter. The story could be a metaphor for the plight of domestic violence victims and the long, dangerous road they travel to escape their situations.
For Michelle and Cassie, it’s definitely a case of jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire – and back into the frying pan again.
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