The Scare Salon

Our main protagonist is Claire Vogel, and the entire story is told from her first-person perspective. She’s a therapist and a mother of four daughters, but recent incidents have had her own mental health not operating at peak performance, let’s say. A year before the events of the novel, her husband Gunnar divorced her, and it’s made pretty clear that Claire still loves him and low-key hopes that they’ll get back together. But those hopes are dashed when Gunnar remarries without warning; this affects Claire much more than she thought it would.

In times of stress, Claire has over the years developed something of an odd coping mechanism, or maybe escape hatch would be a better term. She likes to dress up kinda sexy, go to a bar or someplace where no one knows her, and try to pick up random men. She always uses fake names and always lies about every aspect of her life. She never actually goes home with or sleeps with any of the men; she just enjoys pretending to be someone else for a while and seeing if she can flirt with a dude and keep him on the hook with a completely invented persona. She has never told anyone about this proclivity and seems pretty ashamed of it.

It’s also implied that Claire may have suffered some type of trauma in her childhood that she’s repressed the memory of, but details about that don’t come out until later on in the story.

So Claire is getting by, working and being a mother to her four kids. There’s a bit of foreshadowing near the beginning of the story, where a seemingly drunk and/or crazed woman starts banging on the door of Claire’s house in the middle of the night, screaming for someone named Patrick, who obviously doesn’t live there. Claire calls the cops, who take the woman away, and though Claire thinks the whole thing is kind of weird, she figures maybe the woman was just confused or wasted and went to the wrong house. No big deal.

The neighborhood Claire lives in is pretty close-knit, and she participates in a book club (read: wine mom party) with a bunch of the other women who live on the same street. At one of these get-togethers, the women are all abuzz with news of the new guy in the neighborhood, a very handsome (and supposedly single) man who is renting the house next door to Claire’s. She hasn’t really seen much of him and says she’s not all that interested, but the other ladies are intrigued. Turns out the guy’s name is Steel Nolan, which made me bust out laughing the first time I read it; I think the author is definitely making a sly joke about the romance novel genre there because that is one of the most Harlequin Romance names I think I’ve ever heard.

Not surprisingly, Steel is a hunky dreamboat who runs his own construction business, and one evening, he pokes his head through Claire’s back fence while she’s out on her deck. The fence and her backyard shed were blown down in a storm months earlier, and she simply hasn’t gotten around to fixing them yet. No problem, Steel says; he’ll fix it all up for her, and even rebuild the shed completely, all for free. Claire is reluctant to take him up on this generous offer, but she does have to admit that he is very charming and seems like a great guy, and he is quite insistent that he wants to do the work for her, so she finally relents.

Now, I know you’re thinking that this guy is way too good to be true, and in this case (just as in real life), you’d be absolutely correct to think that. As much as Claire tries to fight her feelings for him, she ends up drawn into a torrid sexual relationship against her better judgment, and she finds that her thoughts are becoming consumed by him. She can’t seem to control herself whenever he’s around, you see. He claims to be falling for her as well, and he even implies that things are starting to get really serious between them.

But very soon, cracks begin to appear in this blissful situation. For one thing, Claire has started seeing a new patient named Whitney whose life events bizarrely start to mirror her own, and during one of her sessions, it comes to light that Whitney might also be dating Steel, even though Steel never mentioned that he was seeing anyone else. Claire confronts him about it, and he vehemently denies dating another woman, but Whitney seems to know a great deal about him, so Claire isn’t sure what to think, other than that she knows one of them has to be lying. She eventually hires a private investigator to look into Steel’s background, and he comes up with some extremely disturbing information.

There are also some creepy and clearly paranormal things happening in her own home, such as random shadows that look like people moving across the walls, someone calling her name when no one is there, a stuffed cat that belongs to her daughter Paris seemingly moving around on its own, and her eldest daughter Annalen starting to act very strangely, sleepwalking and doing odd things she claims not to remember later. Claire also starts seeing a terrifying man in a leather hat who appears and disappears at will, and she begins having something like visions after visiting a mysterious website whose address she found on a business card left in her car.

Crazy stuff starts happening in the wider neighborhood as well, such as a horrific murder-suicide at one of the neighbors’ houses. Another neighbor, a Korean woman named Hyo, believes that some kind of portal has opened, referring to all the “holes” in the ground, but for a while, nobody pays her much attention.

As events get more and more unhinged, a desperate Claire has to reassess her non-belief in God and demons, and takes to consulting psychics, paranormal investigators, and exorcists to get to the bottom of what’s happening to her family and the residents of the street at large. She also has to deal with the guilt she feels, because she suspects that her relationship with Steel was the catalyst for all of the disasters that followed.

I read a few other reviews of this book, and I noticed that more than one person compared it favorably to the 1982 film Poltergeist, which I would consider a fairly accurate comparison, in that it’s set in an upper-middle-class suburb and involves dark forces trying to capture the souls of those in the house and in the neighborhood. I also saw someone state that it had a vibe somewhat similar to Grady Hendrix’s excellent novel The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires (which I reviewed here), and I think that’s also a pretty astute assessment. The Neighbor has its own thing going on, so it’s not the same as either of those, but it’s somewhere in that general ballpark.

For me, I really enjoyed how this story took some of the tropes of a romance novel or domestic thriller—such as a recently divorced woman falling for the hot bad boy next door—and going in a supernatural direction with it, rather than just having the guy turn out to be a serial killer or something. There is something of a serial killer aspect in this story, but it’s minor, more of a background plot element than the main event.

If I had any criticism, it would be that I feel as though a few of the characters were unnecessary and could have been trimmed—for example, the first psychic who shows up at Claire’s house and claims there’s nothing there didn’t contribute much to the plot, and the exorcist introduced toward the end didn’t wind up doing much of anything and maybe should have been introduced earlier or eliminated altogether—but overall, this was a very compelling story that moved forward with great momentum, never really slowing down for a minute. I loved the buildup of all the weird details, such as the mystery behind the spooky man in the leather hat, and the character of Whitney having exactly the same things happen to her that were happening to Claire. I also loved the slow rollout of the information about Steel Nolan that came to light through Claire’s interactions with the private investigator; each detail revealed was stranger than the last, and it really kept your eyes glued to the page so you could figure out exactly what this guy’s deal was.

I would definitely recommend this to anyone who’s looking for a fast-paced, creepy, supernatural horror with great characters and an interesting story angle growing out of a standard domestic thriller.

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends.