The Scare Salon

He lives in his mother’s home, and said mother is bedridden; she’s still mentally sharp as a tack, but physically she can’t do much of anything anymore. Chandler is therefore obliged to care for her, and of course she’s a real twunt about it, criticizing everything he does. Even though Chandler is kind of a sad sack and largely not that sympathetic (and becomes even less so as the story goes on), you can kinda understand how he ended up the way he is, because his mother says terrible shit to him about how worthless he is at every opportunity. So you actually don’t feel bad when he takes minor little passive-aggressive swipes at her, because she is the literal worst.

One of the only bright spots in Chandler’s pitiful life is people-watching, and oh boy, does he go all in on that. He has a whole routine where he moves from window to window at various times of day depending on which of the neighbors is coming home or going out, and he’s even got binoculars to spy on ladies undressing in other houses on the block, because of course he does. His day is basically: get up, give his mother food and medicine, go jerk off to porn in his basement man cave, then watch various neighbors until it’s time to feed his mom again. He has all the neighbors’ routines memorized, too, and knows all kinds of personal things about them, either from spying directly or looking stuff up on the internet.

His very favorite person to watch, though, is the beautiful Samantha, who lives next door. She’s about his age, and he is convinced that she’s his soul mate. Problem is, she’s already married (to a cop named Kevin) and has an adorable five-year-old son named Dylan. Chandler always tries to be slick, such as going out to get the mail right when Samantha brings Dylan home from daycare so he can insinuate himself into an interaction, but Samantha has no qualms about telling him straight up to leave her alone. And her husband Kevin has absolutely no patience for Chandler at all, threatening him with violence if he so much as sets foot on their property.

Chandler knows something about Kevin, though: he’s horribly abusive. Chandler can hear the screaming matches coming from the couple’s house at night, and it’s revealed later that pretty much everyone in the neighborhood knows what’s going on over there as well. Because of this, Chandler is convinced that all he has to do is be there for Samantha, and she will eventually realize that Kevin is an asshole and that Chandler is really the man for her.

As the story goes on, it starts to become clear that Chandler is losing his grip on reality, as he starts spiraling further into delusions that Samantha is just waiting for him to come and rescue her like a knight on a white horse. At about a quarter of the way through the book, Chandler does something very bad which seems to act as a catalyst for going full steam ahead on the crazy train. From that point, the title of Mine will make a lot more sense, as Chandler starts to genuinely believe—mild spoiler alert—that Samantha and Dylan are actually his family.

This was a very fast-paced, compelling read that snared me in immediately and kept me hooked all the way through; I read the whole thing in a single sitting because I didn’t want to put it down. Although I did have a few minor quibbles with the writing style, which veered a bit too much toward tell-don’t-show, it didn’t bother me after a while, and the tale was presented in a very straightforward fashion that made it an extremely easy read.

I was also not a huge fan of the times when the perspective would change from Chandler to another character without much warning, but again, this was fairly minor, and it didn’t happen all that much.

I’ll further note that there is something of a “twist” ending which I admit I did not see coming. I’m not sure if it was sufficiently set up, though; in other words, since we’re seeing most of the story from Chandler’s perspective, he basically withheld information from the reader in order for there to be a twist. It’s not a big deal, and it did surprise me; in fact, I was so intrigued by the ending that I actually wouldn’t mind a sequel to this to see what happens next, because there are a whole lot of interesting directions this story could go in.

All in all, I liked this novel quite a bit; it was really entertaining and briskly paced, and the character of Chandler was well-delineated. It seems some other reviewers had a lot more sympathy for him as a character than I did, but I still found him intriguing even though he’s a delusional monster. As I mentioned, the way his mother treated him made it pretty obvious why he turned out that way.

I would definitely recommend this to readers who like psychological thrillers or stalker-type stories, especially ones told from the point of view of an unlikeable narrator. If this is just LM Kaplin’s first novel, I think he’s got a bright future in horror ahead of him.

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends.