The Scare Salon

Overall, I think I loved this just as much as I did The Hollow Places, though I did have some slight issues with the pacing, which I’ll elaborate on later. But I adored the characters, particularly the main protagonist, and I really dug the concept and the slow buildup of intriguing weirdness that really sucked me in and kept me obsessively turning the pages. Though I thought the climax seemed slightly rushed and was resolved far too easily, this was a very entertaining read, and I had a ball reading it.

Our main character, the person whose perspective we see the entire story through, is an archaeological entomologist by the same of Samantha Montgomery. She’s a delightfully skeptical, sarcastic individual, with little patience or talent for social interaction. She seems quite happily single, and passionate about her work with insects. Her thought processes and sly asides throughout the story had me busting out laughing in places; if Samantha was a real person, in other words, I think she and I would definitely get along, because she is awkward and awesome and funny as shit.

At the beginning of the book, Samantha has been furloughed from the archaeological dig she’d been working on because a Native American burial ground was accidentally uncovered and all the legalities have to be sorted out (this situation doesn’t have anything to do with the main tale, by the way; it’s just a reason for her to be out of work for a bit). Her supervisor has given her some remote busy-work to keep her financially afloat until the dig can continue, so Samantha decides she’ll use her unexpected time off to travel to her childhood home in South Carolina to stay with her mom for a while.

Her reasons for doing this are two-fold. For one thing, Samantha and her mom have always been close, and it’s been a while since she visited. But perhaps more troubling is the fact that Samantha’s older brother Brad has informed Samantha that mom seems a little…off lately. He’s not sure what’s going on, but he thought Mom was acting pretty weird last time he saw her, and he wants Samantha to stay with her for a while and see if she can figure out what’s up. They’re hoping her behavior isn’t an indicator of early-onset dementia, but the possibility is utmost in their minds.

So Samantha arrives at the house where she grew up, which is in a bland, cookie-cutter suburb that has absolutely nothing to distinguish it from any other similar neighborhood. The house previously belonged to Samantha’s grandmother, Gran Mae, who died twenty years ago. Samantha, Brad, and their mother were forced to move in with Gran Mae back in the day, and neither Brad nor Samantha were the biggest fans of the old bat; she was very old-school Southern, always expecting everyone to live up to her strict, Leave it to Beaver standards of what a family should be, and getting pretty cranky when people didn’t behave as she wished them to. She wasn’t physically abusive really, but she absolutely caused some emotional trauma in both kids that they’re still very much dealing with as adults.

When Samantha gets back home, she starts to notice what Brad was talking about right away. Mom sort of seems like her normal self sometimes, but Samantha sees that the house has been redecorated closer to the way it was when Gran Mae was still alive. This is disquieting, because Samantha’s mom always had funky, eclectic tastes, with brightly colored walls and cool artwork, but now the walls have been painted a boring ecru color, and worst of all, Mom has reinstalled a kinda racist painting of a Confederate wedding that Gran Mae loved over the fireplace. Mom always hated that painting, yet there it is, and when Samantha asks why she put the ugly thing back up there, Mom sorta deflects the question.

Mom also seems kind of nervous, especially in regards to discussions about Gran Mae; whereas before, Mom acknowledged how shitty her mother was, now she seems to take great pains to defend the old woman, even though obviously Gran Mae is long dead and can no longer hear her.

There are a couple of other odd things going on as well. For instance, Gran Mae was known for her gorgeous rose garden, which still looks fabulously perfect even though Mom insists that she doesn’t lift a finger to maintain it. Samantha also notes to her dismay that there are absolutely no insects in the rose garden, which as an entomologist she knows is completely unnatural.

Further, there’s the small matter of vultures constantly sitting around the property, seemingly watching the house. A neighbor lady, Gail—who had something of a rivalry going with Gran Mae back in the old days—cryptically tells Samantha that the vultures are “keeping an eye” on the place.

Over the ensuing days, bizarre events begin to ramp up: the house is besieged with a swarm of ladybugs, there’s some minor poltergeist-type activity, and Samantha thinks she feels an unseen something combing its fingers through her hair while she’s sleeping. Samantha also notices an alarming detail in an old framed photograph of her in her high school graduation outfit: it almost looks like a child’s pale hand emerging from the dirt in the rose garden.

For the first three-quarters of the book or so, smaller events like this keep occurring, and this really contributes to the mystery of what exactly is going on. It’s pretty clear it has something to do with Gran Mae, but for a long time, you’re not entirely certain what the deal is. It seems more complex than a simple haunting, and anyway, why would Gran Mae have suddenly started haunting the place after being quietly in her grave for two decades?

And indeed, the explanation for the incidents is far more strange than it appears, but here’s where my issues with the pacing that I mentioned earlier come into play. While I absolutely loved the idea behind the story, I felt as though the buildup was so good that by the time everything went batshit insane at the end, it seemed as though it all got sorted out too quickly; in other words, the story seemed slightly lopsided to me. It’s going along at a steadily ratcheting pace, laying out all these intriguing hints of the larger picture, but then suddenly a really out-there thing happens, and it seems like it comes out of left field a bit. From that point, everything just goes balls to the wall, and as I said, it all seemed to happen and get sorted out with little fanfare. Don’t get me wrong, the concept and imagery here are outstanding and super creepy, but I guess I would have just liked the whole climax fleshed out more, and the mythology behind the concept built out to a greater degree.

That said, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this book to anyone who enjoyed Kingfisher’s other works, and anyone who loves a good Southern gothic. The idea is fantastic, the characters are compelling and seem like real people, and some of the scenes are legitimately unsettling. Though I would have liked more expansion of the third act, I really liked this as a whole, and will definitely be seeking out more works of hers.

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends.