The Scare Salon

It is simple, well-written, and a compelling read for sure, with some twists and turns I absolutely did not predict (for better or worse), and its use of illustrations (by Will Staehle and Doogie Horner) distinguished it as well. I guess I enjoyed it while I was reading it, but I’m gonna say right out of the gate that one, it’s not strictly a horror story, being more akin to a mystery or a thriller with ghost story elements; and two, I did have some pretty big issues with its messaging, which sort of wallops you upside the head toward the end (though there was some problematic shit in the beginning too, not gonna lie) and the ludicrousness of some of its later plot twists. I found, in fact, that the more I thought about the book in the days afterward, the more it pissed me off. I’ll get more into it a bit later, though, because discussing the issues will necessitate some spoilers. So I’ll put a spoiler warning right here, just to be on the safe side.

So this is Jason Rekulak’s second novel; his first one, The Impossible Fortress, was published in 2017 and shortlisted for an Edgar Award. I’ll also note that Rekulak was the publisher of Quirk Books for years, which released several modern horror favorites, such as Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith, and several books by Grady Hendrix.

Hidden Pictures is told from the perspective of a twenty-one-year-old woman named Mallory Quinn, who has recently been working hard to put her mess of a life back together. A couple of years back, see, she was a track star with a running scholarship and a bright future, but one day she was driving a car and got into an accident (that wasn’t really her fault) in which her little sister Beth was killed. Mallory was also horribly injured, got addicted to painkillers, and eventually moved on to the harder stuff, like heroin, and resorted to prostitution at times in order to get her fix. Unsurprisingly, she and her mother became estranged after that point.

At the beginning of the story, though, Mallory has successfully completed a rehab program and has been sober for eighteen months. Her sponsor, Russell, is able to give her a lead on what seems like a perfect job: being a live-in nanny over the summer for a wealthy couple with an adorable son.

Although you’d think that a family with the means to hire a nanny for their kid in the first place would have their pick of candidates and wouldn’t have to go with a recovering drug addict, it turns out that the mom, Caroline, is a psychiatrist who works with veterans and former addicts, and is very understanding toward Mallory’s struggles. The dad, Ted, seems much more reluctant, but Caroline assures Mallory that she’ll be able to talk him into it. And lo and behold, she does. The couple allows Mallory to move into their small but beautifully renovated guest house and makes her feel as though she’s part of the family.

The kid at the center of the tale is a five-year-old moppet named Teddy, who is the sort of child any parent would kill for: smart, curious, well-behaved, funny, and imaginative. Mallory adores him immediately, and Teddy seems to return the feeling. Teddy’s parents are slightly overprotective, and give Mallory a list of house rules for dealing with their offspring, which actually seems a fairly reasonable thing for parents to do. But right here was where I first started having a little bit of an issue with the book.

So it’s made extremely clear that Ted and Caroline are atheists, but they seem to be the type of militant atheists that mostly only exist in the vivid imaginations of certain types of right-wing religious folks. Like, right there on the house rules list, they pretty much say that they’re so strictly a SCIENCE-based household that they don’t celebrate Christmas and don’t allow anyone to say, “God bless you” to their kid when he sneezes. Which…hmmmm, okay.

Look, I consider myself quite a firm atheist, and I’ve been one since I was old enough to have an opinion on the matter. And no, my parents didn’t “raise” me that way, as they were vaguely religious themselves; I just figured it out on my own. And I have never in my fifty years of life met another atheist who was even a little bit offended by someone saying “God bless you” to them or their kids, or by someone wishing them or their kids a merry Christmas, or anything of the sort. In fact, I have never met another atheist who didn’t celebrate Christmas or an equivalent; it’s a fun winter holiday with pagan roots anyway, and you’d have to be a real Scrooge to not get in on some of that action. Matter of fact, I don’t believe in God one tiny iota and I fucking love Christmas (not as much as I love Halloween, but still, it’s pretty rad). I’m not saying there aren’t cranky, holiday-hating atheists out there somewhere, but it’s not real common in my experience; they’re pretty extreme outliers, in other words.

So immediately my little, “oh shit is this gonna be some bullshit right-wing propaganda” antennas are going up, and this impression was only strengthened by the fact that Ted and Caroline, while initially welcoming and really nice to Mallory, are also portrayed as condescending and superior, and have some other so-called “woke leftist” traits, such as being vigilant about eating organic food and staying away from red meat, and not letting Teddy watch TV or use a tablet or smartphone (and there was some other stuff later that hammered the point home even more egregiously, but we’ll get there).

By contrast, Mallory is described as a Christian; she wears a cross, her sponsor is a preacher, and she says early on that she gave her life to Jesus Christ in rehab and all that. She also tries out different churches in the area where she moves to, but never really settles on one. Now, I will note that her religiosity isn’t nearly as overt as Ted and Caroline’s atheism is, but that’s yet another reason I started getting kinda suspicious of the author’s motives; to wit, because she’s a Christian, Mallory is apparently allowed to be presented as flawed and multi-dimensional, but evidently, the author thought it would be okay to show the atheists as these cartoonish, straw-man stereotypes.

Anyway, I was just rolling my eyes at this point, thinking the author likely had either never met any real atheists, liberals, or vegetarians, and/or was trying to push a particular agenda. But I wasn’t really all that mad about it, because although it was laughably heavy-handed for sure, Ted and Caroline still seemed like good people otherwise. I let it slide and continued with the story, because I don’t have to agree with everything the author (or the characters) think or do in order to enjoy a story, right? Right. I’m a tolerant bitch like that (at least up to a point). But I have to admit I was starting to get that feeling like I got when I was reading that terrible Frank Peretti Bigfoot book and had to nope out when it turned into a straight-up creationist screed.

So Teddy really likes to draw, and most of the stuff he draws is normal kid stuff: people, animals, houses, happy suns, shit like that. Teddy also has a purported imaginary friend who he calls Anya; sometimes he puts Anya into his drawings, and she’s a little bit creepy-looking, to say the least. Teddy’s parents, being all about SCIENCE, allow him to have this imaginary friend because they realize it’s a normal part of growing up, but tell him in no uncertain terms that Anya is not real.

Mallory, though, being more “spiritual” and all that, starts to believe that maybe Anya is actually real, as not only does Teddy do drawings of her which become increasingly disturbing (such as someone being dragged through the woods by their hair and buried), but Mallory also hears Teddy seemingly having a one-sided conversation with someone in his room. Mallory asks around and discovers that there’s a well-known story around the neighborhood that concerns the very guest house where she now lives. Back in the day, so the story goes, a woman named Annie, the artist niece of the guy who owned the property, disappeared from the house, leaving behind nothing but an alarming amount of blood splattered across the walls. She was never found, and everyone presumed she’d been murdered. Everybody in town knows this story, though some people think it’s just an urban legend.

Now, another unrelated family lived on the property for decades before Ted and Caroline arrived, and they used the fateful guest house as a storage shed. They never complained about any paranormal activity as far as anyone knows. But Mallory (along with a flaky neighbor named Mitzi who makes her living as a medium and is also a flaming racist, so there’s that) believes that when Ted and Caroline renovated the guest house, they stirred up Annie’s spirit, and that Annie is using Teddy’s drawings to communicate to the world what happened to her. The name Annie is pretty close to Anya, after all, and once Teddy’s drawings start to become way more detailed and accomplished than a five-year-old could manage, Mallory becomes ever more convinced that she’s correct. She cements the theory even more when she installs a baby monitor in Teddy’s room and sees him apparently becoming “possessed,” and then not remembering what he drew after he comes out of it.

Mallory and her love interest Adrian, who is Mexican and also religious, believes her hypothesis, and the two of them attempt to arrange all of Teddy’s drawings into some semblance of a narrative that makes sense, but they’re having trouble figuring out what this supposed ghost is trying to tell them. Mitzi organizes a Ouija board session, which seems to work but produces nothing but what looks like a bunch of gibberish.

As the investigation continues, however, it starts to become obvious that whatever this thing is that’s communicating through Teddy, it’s not exactly what it appears, and this all leads up to a big, shocking twist which as I mentioned I’m going to have to spoil in order to break down what’s so galling about the end of this book. So here’s your second spoiler warning.

It turns out that Annie, the artist niece who was supposedly murdered in the guest house, isn’t dead at all; she just eloped with a black man way back in the day, and her shitty dad faked her disappearance and supposed murder to cover up his shame. So that whole plot thread was nothing but a misdirection. The real villains of the piece, of course, are those evil liberal atheists Ted and Caroline!

See, the ghost, we discover, is actually a woman named Margit, a Hungarian immigrant who Caroline used to see in the neighborhood where they lived a couple of years ago. Ted and Caroline wanted kids but were having trouble conceiving, and Caroline began becoming more and more agitated by Margit, who had a beautiful two-year-old daughter named Flora that Caroline perceived the woman was neglecting.

One day, Caroline came across Margit painting in a clearing in the woods, and evidently Margit was so focused on her work that she didn’t notice when Flora wandered off. Caroline swooped in and “rescued” the child, and after Margit tried to get her daughter back, Caroline accidentally/on purpose killed her, and roped Ted into burying the body. Then the couple essentially kidnapped Margit’s kid and started to raise her as their own. Because Ted and Caroline aren’t master criminals, though, Margit’s body was found pretty quickly, which meant that the couple had to make themselves scarce, moving to another town with the kidnapped child after a stint in hiding.

In order to allay suspicion from their crime, they also cut off Flora’s hair and put “boy” clothes on her and started calling her Teddy, which means that the Teddy character we’ve been following this whole time is actually a little girl. Which would have been a sort of tired but not necessarily offensive twist IF the book didn’t VERY explicitly refer to the kid as trans. SIGH. So, I apologize to everyone reading this because I’m sure all of you, being intelligent, already know this, but in case the author of the book is reading, I’ll make it clear: KIDNAPPING A KID AND MAKING THEM WEAR ANOTHER GENDER’S CLOTHES TO KEEP YOU FROM GETTING CAUGHT DOES NOT MAKE THAT CHILD “TRANS” AND WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU EVEN TALKING ABOUT?!? Clothes don’t make you transgender, dude. Words mean things. You’re basically just putting the kid in a disguise, which has nothing to do with their gender identity at all, and it’s mystifying to me that this bizarre notion was just presented as though it was a given.

Further, the way this “twist” was framed sounded as though the author was trying to paint these evil, vegetarian, atheist liberals as parents who were forcing their kid into a gender identity they didn’t want, which again is a very common anti-trans “argument.” And it didn’t help that there was also a scene much earlier in the book where Teddy asks Mallory a standard, five-year-old’s question about “boy parts” and “girl parts,” and when Mallory tells Caroline about the question, Caroline comes home from the library or bookstore with a couple of books for the kid that are described as having explicit, full-color illustrations of anal sex and cunnilingus. Being a sex-positive atheist liberal myself, I can assure you that no sane parent of any political persuasion is giving a FIVE-YEAR-OLD a book showing that stuff, unless that parent is a complete psycho. Is this really what right-wingers think liberals do, or want? Jesus fucking Christ, people, crawl out of your hateful, hysterical little rabbit holes sometime and join us in the real world. It’s much better out here.

So, getting back to the actual plot of the story, it was actually Margit’s ghost all along, making Teddy/Flora draw pictures to try to explain what happened, because Margit didn’t speak much English. Once this is all laid out in a classic villain’s monologue by Caroline, there are some wildly improbable plot developments, in which Caroline and Ted also kill Mitzi by making it look like she OD’d on heroin, and then plan to do the same thing to Mallory, only Ted has apparently fallen in love with Mallory and wants to get rid of Caroline and run away with Mallory and leave the kid behind? It gets pretty batshit. Both Ted and Caroline get killed, but of course steadfast Christian Mallory saves the day, rescuing Teddy/Flora and eventually getting her returned to her biological family.

Like I said, this was actually a pretty interesting mystery/ghost story in the beginning, despite some caveats. It kept me glued to the page, and it went in directions I didn’t expect. But by the time of the final reveal(s), it was just too much. Aside from all the ham-handed stereotyping and propaganda, which just gave me a headache, there was also the whole “straining credulity” issue. It seems, for example, like it would it be pretty clear to a nanny that this kid being passed off as a boy was actually a girl; they went swimming a bunch of times in the book, and wouldn’t Mallory have helped the kid bathe or get ready for bed? Besides that, the whole final third of the novel asked us to buy into the characters of Ted and Caroline, who had been perfectly nice, normal people up until that point, suddenly turning into wildly exaggerated, cackling supervillains. It was pretty ridiculous.

Oh, and in addition to all of the flagrantly in-your-face anti-trans and anti-atheist stuff, there was also a sprinkling of lazy racial stereotypes for added spice; the one Asian character, for example, was a “pink-haired weirdo” who was really into anime, and the one Mexican family, who were also wealthy and lived in the same neighborhood, were landscapers who mowed all the other rich people’s lawns. Also, the Mitzi character says shit about all Mexicans being illegals and rapists, and I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to like her, especially because she calls out Ted and Caroline for how elitist and hoity-toity they are.

It’s also stated outright that Mallory’s mom couldn’t help her with her addiction problems because she was fat; like, that’s the only reason. At the end of the book, Mallory discovers that her mom started exercising and lost some weight, and so then Mallory decides to reestablish a relationship with her, because Mallory knows that fitness is next to Godliness, or something. So yeah, not great all around.

To be fair, this was largely a solid (if not super original) concept and a decently-written suspense story with supernatural elements, and the illustrations were cool and really added a lot to the tale. But the blatant right-wing dog-whistling got pretty tiresome, and ended up just leaving a bad taste in my mouth. There’s a really intriguing mystery in here behind all of the unnecessary political fearmongering; it’s just a shame that the author couldn’t keep his weird agenda to himself and just tell that story. I’m not sure if Jason Rekulak is just kinda ignorant or actually believes the stupid shit in this book, but either way, it’s not cute and attitudes like that do real harm to real people. There is, sadly, absolutely a market for this sort of thing (see the aforementioned Frank Peretti, for instance), but I am clearly not it. If you are, have at it, but I’m out.

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends.