The Scare Salon

Our main character is a young man named Alex Fulmer. As a boy, he was severely abused by his father, who he only ever refers to as the Old Bastard. He adored his mother, who was also the target of his father’s drunken assaults, but when Alex was eight years old, his mother died of cancer and he was left with only his monstrous father to care for him.

Well, you can imagine how well that whole situation went. Not long after Alex’s mother died, his dad built a bunker-type cell in the basement and locked Alex in there day and night, only opening the door to give him a microwaved meal once a day and empty the bucket he’s forced to use as a toilet. The poor kid was terrified in there, not least because there was no window, and when the door was closed it was pitch black inside.

Oh, and there were also the rats. He could hear them every night, crawling around in his cell, looking for leftover morsels. Eventually, he got so tired of being kept awake that he decided to kill them all, luring them out into the open with crumbs of food and then stomping them to death under his shoes.

Of course, he didn’t have anything in the cell to clean up all the bodies with, and his father was so furious when he saw the mess that he refused to feed his son anything until he ate all the rats he squished. The first ones he’s forced to eat raw, but then his dad does him the favor of cooking the rest of them. What a guy.

So Alex lived like this for seven months before the authorities finally investigated after representatives from the school started wondering what happened to the boy. Alex’s father was arrested, Alex was rescued, and he was sent to live with his aunt and uncle, where he tried to have a normal life at last, with only partial success.

Once he’s a bit older, he’s able to get a job on a construction site, which he actually quite enjoys. The problem is that one day, a couple of his co-workers call him over to show him some kiddie porn they’ve acquired, in the form of some very upsetting Polaroids (the story is set in the 80s and 90s, by the way). Alex is appalled; having experienced terrible abuse himself, he has nothing but seething hatred for abusers of any kind, and is deeply empathetic with their child victims.

So Alex decides he’s going to do just what he did with those pesky rats all those years ago: kill off all the vermin. In this case, he starts stalking the men with the photos so he can see where the “nest” is, i.e. where the Polaroids are being produced. Once he identifies a pedophile, it’s only a matter of time before he tracks them to their house and smashes their skull with a hammer.

Obviously, his crimes don’t go unnoticed forever, especially since he makes no effort to hide the bodies and often leaves the incriminating photos scattered on or near the victim’s corpse. He’s immensely angered by the fact that the media are treating the murders as essentially a set of serial killings and are failing to mention that all the “victims” are kiddie diddlers, but this doesn’t stop him from continuing with what he regards as his mission in life.

Alex is usually moving from job to job so no one will suspect what he’s up to, but after one brief spell of unemployment, he scores what seems to be his dream position: working as a set builder on a local children’s television program. He had always loved the theater when he was in school and worked building sets then too, and what’s more, the TV show he’d be working on was one he used to watch with his mother when he was a child, which brings back some of the only happy memories he had from his childhood.

Everyone on set seems to love Alex, even though he largely keeps to himself, and they’re all appreciative of his hard work and dedication to his craft. Everything seems to be going so smoothly that Alex almost thinks he should probably stop his vigilante crusade against the pedophiles, just so he doesn’t fuck up a good thing.

However, as you might have surmised, one person working on this TV show might be a candidate for Alex’s hammer of vengeance.

As I mentioned, this was a quick, entertaining read; it’s largely exposition-based with not a huge amount of dialogue, as we’re in Alex’s head the entire time. This gives us a lot of insight into his thought processes, and though we as the reader can perhaps condemn the way he goes about things, most people can of course understand why he does what he does.

The only major criticism I have is with the ending, which seemed as though it was wrapped up with too little fanfare and needed more substance. I feel like the buildup of confronting the two “big-bads” at the end—the TV show guy and Alex’s father—didn’t really amount to much, as things were resolved far too quickly and with little description or detail. The story up to that point was great, but I feel like the end could have benefited from being a lot longer and more drawn out and epic.

If you like brutal, revenge-based stories with morally gray protagonists, then this might be just what the doctor ordered; it’s short enough to read in an hour or so, and it never lets up all the way through. I think this might be James Watjen’s first published work, and if so, I’m eager to see what he comes up with in the future.

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends.