The Scare Salon

I will say right up front that I didn’t like Jimmy as a character as much as I liked Randolph; Jimmy often comes across as a bit smarmy and full of himself, though I will admit that his genuine love for his Sphynx cat Colson did go some way toward endearing him to me more. Shout-out to all the cat dads out there; y’all are awesome.

Like the other two novels, though, this one also features an investigation of sorts (into two missing people, in this case) that descends into supernatural territory (specifically vampires, though of a slightly more folkloric bent than your run-of-the-mill modern bloodsucker). Of the three books of Golbourn’s I’ve read thus far, I think I generally like this one the best, even though I’m not a huge fan of vampire media, as you guys know. I did have a few issues with The Last Breath Before Death, some of which I mentioned in my reviews of his other work and one of which I’ll elaborate on later, but overall, this was a very compelling read with a cool backstory behind the villains and an intriguing mystery that spanned three countries.

So Jimmy is originally from Shropshire, England, but has been living in New York City for quite a while. He’s a very successful comic book illustrator, as I mentioned earlier, and does a comic called The Gun from Montana with a friend and collaborator named Donovan. He also has a sideline gig as a freelance writer and is mainly known for investigating haunted houses and writing about his experiences for various publications. He is skeptical by nature but has seen some paranormal phenomena for himself, so he knows that at least some of it is legit.

He lives in a decent apartment in the city, and is quite happily single, living alone with his beloved kitty. He occasionally goes on Tinder and has some casual hook-ups, such as with his latest fuck-buddy Sophia, a tattoo artist with a super high sex drive who’s into light BDSM, but he is very reluctant to get tied down to any one person.

All that’s neither here nor there, though. Near the beginning of the tale, his mother calls from England and tells him that his half-brother Quentin and Quentin’s best friend Riley have apparently gone missing. They told family and friends they were going on a week-long hiking trip to Germany, but it’s now been two weeks and no one has heard from them. Mom, whose name is Lillian, is understandably worried.

Jimmy is bummed that his mom is concerned, but he’s honestly not that upset about the whole missing person situation. He and his half-brother are estranged after an argument over Jimmy being unable to fly over to Quentin’s wedding, and they haven’t spoken in years. Jimmy apologized for not going to the wedding, and he had a very good reason for his non-attendance, but his brother apparently wasn’t having it. Jimmy figures if his brother had wanted to mend fences, he could have called and patched things up at any time. He never did, so Jimmy basically adopted a “well, fuck him, then” attitude.

Over the next few days, though, he finds himself thinking about Quentin more and more, even though he literally has not given the dude a moment’s consideration for ages. To take his mind off things, he decides to make another trip out to a supposedly haunted house on Staten Island owned by a family called the Holbrooks whom he’s been working on an article about.

While there, he runs into a man named Walter, a psychic medium who had been assisting the Holbrook family with their haunting. Jimmy had investigated Walter in the course of his research into the supposed paranormal activity, though he doesn’t tell Walter this, and he suspects that the psychic is probably a fake.

But as the two men are talking, Walter comes up with the name Quentin unprompted, and says that he knows Jimmy is worried about him. Jimmy is still skeptical, but starts to have an inkling that maybe Walter is the real thing after all. Following a nice chat, Walter simply gives Jimmy his card and says to come see him for a reading if he wants to.

After having a strange dream about his brother, recalling an accident Quentin had when they were younger, Jimmy decides to bite the bullet and go visit Walter to see if the psychic can come up with any information about where his brother might be. At the reading, Walter has an unprecedented and horrifying vision, although it’s too vague to make out any specific details. What he is able to determine, however, is that both Quentin and Riley are still alive, but are in terrible danger from some unidentified evil.

Jimmy decides to fly to England to see his mother and support her through the investigation into his brother’s disappearance. Leaving his kitty Colson with a trusted friend, he jets off and ends up staying with his mother at Quentin’s house while they try to coordinate with law enforcement in northern Germany, where the men went missing.

Things seem to be at a frustrating standstill; neither Quentin nor Riley had told anyone specifically where they were going, and although the German police are looking for them, they don’t have much information to go on. In Quentin’s house, Jimmy finds a diary with a page torn out; doing the old “rubbing a pencil on the next page” trick, he discovers that the page was just a mundane list of stuff to do and buy before the trip, though one of the items on the list specifies meeting someone named Detlef in a town called Salzwedel. This clue is passed on to the authorities.

Not long after arriving in England, though, Jimmy receives a mysterious phone call at Quentin’s house from a man who knows who he is and knows that his brother is missing. Jimmy agrees to meet with this man alone in a public place, and the dude is a little weird; pale and thin, and clad in all black. The man, who never gives his name, tells Jimmy about a Serbian vampire cult, but Jimmy is annoyed and just wants to know where his brother is. The man has to leave suddenly, seemingly paranoid that someone is watching them, but he meets up with Jimmy the next day and spins him a long yarn about the last remnants of a clan of vampires who are apparently still operating in Germany and may have had something to do with Quentin and Riley’s vanishing act.

After this point, since the police investigation seems to be going nowhere fast, Jimmy decides to travel to Germany himself to try and find his brother.

On the whole, I found this an entertaining, gripping read, with a mystery that unspooled at a steady pace and kept me engaged the whole way through. Even though I’m not super into vampires, I liked the more folklore- and cult-based aspect of the monsters here, which recalled old European legends in an appealing way.

Some of the issues I mentioned with Alan Golbourn’s other books—such as overly expositional and slightly repetitive dialogue that’s a bit clunky and doesn’t sound all that much the way real people talk, and villains over-explaining their motives (though Jimmy does at one point tell one of the baddies that he sounds like a Bond villain, so at least there’s some self-awareness)—is still present here, but seems a bit less prevalent.

One thing that bothered me, and which I don’t remember encountering in the author’s previous works, was a handful of the spoken asides or thoughts that Jimmy had. As I said before, Jimmy came across as slightly arrogant to me, though not so overtly that it turned me off his character entirely. But there were a few instances where he would just say or think some kinda sideways shit that didn’t have anything to do with the story at hand and just came across as the author trying to insert his own opinions randomly. For example, Jimmy is idly swiping through Tinder early in the story and suddenly goes off on a weird mini-rant about women “with ridiculous standards” who don’t look like their pictures but expect “a hero with model good looks,” and have the audacity to just disappear and unmatch after messaging him for a while. The “sheer arrogance” of these women, some of whom were pregnant or just had babies, God forbid, apparently “boils his piss,” even though at other times he seems to have no problem hooking up with women and claims he doesn’t want any more than casual flings. Then later in the story, he’s on Tinder again and thinks of someone as a “stupid bitch” because she stopped talking to him after they’d exchanged a few flirtatious messages. It all came across as unreasonably angry, entitled, and misogynistic to me; I know Jimmy is not a real dude, but if he was, I would tell him that there are lots of reasons a woman might stop messaging you on Tinder, one of which is that you said something that pissed her off or creeped her out and she was too uncomfortable to call you out on it. Again, this whole sidebar has nothing to do with the narrative at all, and therefore sticks out like a sore thumb.

Jimmy also makes a supposedly clever “joke” to his mother about Chinese food being made of cats and dogs, which was already a tired old wheeze when my racist grandpa used to say it back in the 1970s. There’s also a bit where Jimmy is in Germany watching one of his favorite movies, Trading Places, on TV in the hotel room, and he laments how the movie would never be made nowadays because of the “Woke Brigade.” My eyes rolled so far back in my head when I read that, I’m pretty sure I saw my frontal cortex. While all of this nonsense isn’t quite as blatant, long-running, or tiresome as the insidious right-wing bullshit in Jason Rekulak’s Hidden Pictures (which I reviewed here), it was really annoying, unnecessary, kinda read as the author’s own sour grapes, and took away from the story.

All that said, some of that stuff might have been in there just to make Jimmy seem more unlikable so that he could slowly learn to be a better person through the trials and tribulations he endures throughout the story as he has to put his life on the line to try and rescue his brother. If that’s the case, then I suppose I can see what the author was going for, trying to give Jimmy more of a pronounced arc. I still think it could have been better conveyed, though.

Despite these bizarre digressions—which could honestly be removed entirely without making the slightest bit of difference, since they don’t serve the story at all anyway—I did enjoy the book overall, and quite a bit at that. The story is captivating, the villains fascinating and suitably evil, and the final battle pretty epic: tense, exciting, and gory, with real stakes and acts of heroism. The mysterious man Jimmy meets at the park is also a great character, tragic and inspiring all at once; I’m kind of hoping Alan Golbourn does more with him in a follow-up book because I’d be interested in reading more of his exploits.

Also, any book with a cool kitty who lives through the entire story always gets extra love from me.

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends.