Dying Room Only by Richard Matheson

Just keep driving if you see a sketchy looking restaurant in the middle of nowhere.

Awful. Just awful. Matheson duped me again with another slick title! I find it completely mind-boggling that the editor, Victor Lavelle, made a conscious decision to include this garbage in the Penguin Classics anthology entitled "The Best of Richard Matheson." Considering the large number of duds in this collection, "The Worst of Richard Matheson" seems more accurate. Dying Room Only is another pointless, dull and anticlimactic work by an author who has a knack for introducing a premise with potential that ends up falling flat. He teases the reader into believing that this will be a compelling story when it is all just smoke and mirrors.

Relying on a familiar horror genre trope, a couple is driving through the desert and decide it would be a great idea to stop at a dilapidated looking restaurant on the side of the road. The reader already knows that this couple is doomed the second they step out of their car. The patrons inside the restaurant are sketchy and give off serial killer vibes but husband and wife decide to stick around anyways because, why not? The turning point occurs when the husband needs to use the washroom and does not return. The wife is then left alone with these creepy men who claim ignorance about the husband's whereabouts when she starts questioning them. She soon realizes that something sinister might be going on here. Great detective work captain obvious. 

At one point she calls the police and a local sheriff quickly arrives on the scene. Now, this is where Matheson could use the Sheriff character in any number of interesting ways. Even if he decided to go down the predictable route and have the Sherriff be an accomplice with the other men in their nefarious scheme, this "twist ending" would still be more satisfying than what Matheson comes up with. It is so nonsensical, reducing everything up until this moment as completely superfluous. An utter waste of time and easily one of the worst stories in this collection.