The Scare Salon

In my Kindle Unlimited recommendations, I kept noticing a very obviously Christmas-themed horror novel popping up, one that features a monstrous Christmas tree on its cover and mysteriously has the supposed author’s name crossed out and replaced with another name, a clever detail that will make a lot more sense once you’ve read the book. Jon Cohn’s Everything Is Temporary was published in early November of 2023, and I have to say, this was a hell of a lot of holiday fun, and really a perfect, entertainingly scary Christmas read. If you’re a fan of movies like Krampus, The Witches, Home Alone, or A Christmas Story, or books like Stephen King’s IT, then this should be right up your alley, as the novel is sort of a mashup of all those things, but with its own unique vibe going on. It’s also a pretty masterfully executed story-inside-a-story, a trope I’ve always rather liked when done well.

At the beginning of the book, there’s a bit of a prologue-type situation involving a terminally ill thirteen- or fourteen-year-old girl named Maya. She’s suffering from leukemia, but she’s been through chemotherapy and seems to be improving. So much so, in fact, that her best friend Emma has been able to come over and spend the day with her for the first time in ages, and the girls have a fantastic time celebrating Christmas.

After Maya goes to bed that night, though, she thinks she sees…something…skittering around in the shadows of her room, and sure enough, this whatever-it-is climbs up on top of her, red and green eyes twinkling. We then cut to black.

The next day, Maya’s parents are grief-stricken to discover that their daughter has passed away in the night. They’re not entirely surprised, however; although Maya’s cancer did seem to be getting better, they didn’t have any illusions about the gravity of her illness. Of course, they have no clue about the mysterious something that really killed Maya.

From this point on, we pivot to follow the family of Emma, Maya’s best friend. Emma, naturally, can’t believe that her best friend is gone, especially because she had convinced herself that Maya was going to get better. Her parents, startup marketing firm owner Sarah and professional artist Tom, try their best to deal with their daughter’s anguish while attempting to work through their own emotions at losing a little girl who was like a second daughter to them.

Six months go by, and Emma’s behavior begins to change. Over the summer, she’d been stuck to her parents’ sides like glue, but once she starts middle school, she gets increasingly secretive and hostile, supposedly spending most of her time with a school friend named Janice who she will never let her parents meet. Tom and Sarah are concerned, of course, but they figure the combination of starting a new school and being without her best friend for the first time since childhood is taking a toll on Emma, and they suspect she’ll get back to normal eventually.

One day, though, Sarah and Tom get a call from security at the local mall, telling her they need to come down and pick up Emma because she was caught destroying mall property. The exasperated couple arrives at the mall and discover that Emma’s stunt wasn’t exactly intentional, but will still need to be paid for. See, Emma claimed she was at the mall with Janice, but that Janice went into Target to get something and Emma didn’t want to go. Bored, she started fooling around on a coin-operated kiddie ride that was shaped like Santa’s sleigh, and she accidentally broke it. The security guard shows Tom and Sarah the footage, and it’s clear that it was all just a silly accident.

But then, Tom starts acting very strangely when he sees a man in a red sweatshirt in the footage who he seems to recognize. This is evidently the same man that he saw passing them earlier on the escalator when they first got to the mall. Sarah is confused: the man didn’t look threatening, and he wasn’t doing anything sinister or suspicious, either on the escalator or in the security footage, so why was Tom reacting with such horror? He claims it’s just because the man gave him bad vibes, but Sarah starts to wonder if her previously reasonable husband might be starting to crack up.

Her suspicions seem to be confirmed after they get home, when Tom makes a way bigger deal about the mall incident than it really warrants, interrogating Emma on why she particularly chose the kiddie ride that looked like Santa’s sleigh to play on, and accusing her of lying about being at the mall with Janice and instead being there with the man in the red sweatshirt, who didn’t even appear to be interacting with Emma at all in the security footage.

Sarah can’t figure out what the hell is going on with Tom, and she asks him if maybe this has something to do with his mother dying on Christmas when he was a kid. He admits that might be a factor, but he also tells her he just has a really bad feeling about something, and he’s sure that Emma is keeping information from them. He then goes ballistic when he finds an elf hat in his daughter’s backpack, even though Emma insists she just got it from school and she doesn’t understand what his problem is.

Sarah is struggling to suss out why her husband is acting like a lunatic all of a sudden, but he won’t really give her any answers. She then finds out that Emma was actually lying about having a friend named Janice, who it turns out doesn’t know her at all.

While Sarah is trying to keep everything together, both at her fledgling business and at home, she gets another blow in the form of a phone call telling her that Tom has been arrested for attempted murder. Turns out he tried to burn down a local house with the occupant still inside, though Sarah is mystified as to why her husband would do this, because she’s never even heard of the guy who Tom tried to kill.

By way of explanation, Tom calls his wife from jail and tells her to look in an old box in his studio for a book he wrote a long time ago, called Everything Is Temporary. He says it will explain everything that’s going on, and hopefully also exonerate him for the attempted murder charges (somehow). Once Sarah finds this book, the novel switches back and forth between Sarah’s point of view and excerpts from Tom’s book, which detail an increasingly unbelievable series of incidents that supposedly happened to Tom when he was a kid, even though he’s slightly changed the names of all the people involved.

I won’t spoil what those events are, but they involve a Christmas house for terminally ill children, a seemingly wonderful and grandmotherly woman named Mrs. Claus who may not be what she seems, and an array of Christmas ornaments and tchotchkes that apparently come to life. Tom insists that everything in the book really happened, and Sarah has to deal with the fact that her husband might not only be losing his ever-loving mind, but that he might have to spend the next five to twenty years in prison.

As I mentioned, this was an absolute blast from start to finish, just a super fun, suspenseful, unspooling mystery with great characters you actually cared about and a wild, very Christmas-heavy plot that got more and more outlandish (in a good way) as the story went on. Having the bulk of the story be from Sarah’s point of view really grounded it, as her disbelief at the bizarre yarn her husband was telling her felt realistic; you could relate to Sarah’s predicament and empathize with her fear that this man she loved more than anything in the world was ranting about monstrous Christmas trees and nefarious Hummel figurines and also was maybe going completely insane. The climax of the story was also very well done and satisfying, with a great final battle in which all the characters felt as though they were in real danger.

Fans of Stephen King’s IT will likely dig this, as it has a similar plot structure of a group of kids battling a monster and then having to fight the same monster as adults, but like I said, this definitely has its own thing going on, and leans hard into the Christmas angle to delightful effect. A definite winner in the holiday horror canon, and unreservedly recommended; pour yourself some hot chocolate, slap on your Santa hat, and bask in the Clausian mayhem.

Until next time, keep it creepy (and Christmassy), my friends.