The Scare Salon

Not everything is spelled out, and I saw some reviewers complain that the ending was too ambiguous and it wasn’t clear exactly what happened, but I didn’t mind this at all, as the story left me a lot to think about after I finished it.

I’ll also note that although the novel starts out as a sort of haunting or possible demon possession tale, it definitely shades toward cosmic horror as it goes on, so whether you’re down for that is entirely up to you. I actually dug the direction the story went in, because it was really unexpected, but I know some readers don’t vibe with the genre shifts, and that’s okay.

The novel is told from the first-person perspective of a young man named Thiago Alvarez, and at times the narrator even goes into second person, although we discover soon enough that he isn’t actually talking to you, the reader; he’s addressing his dead wife, Vera.

At the very beginning of the story, in fact, Thiago is at Vera’s funeral, trying to deal with the grief of losing his best friend and true love, and navigating the intrusive and largely unwanted “support” of his wife’s friends and family. We don’t find out how Vera died until a bit later, but because Thiago makes reference to her death being all over the media, we know it must have been something high profile, perhaps a murder.

There are also hints that Thiago believes there are larger forces at play that caused Vera’s death, and he begins to talk about the strange events leading up to the incident as perhaps being part of some complex pattern that started, innocuously enough, with Vera’s purchase of an Alexa-like virtual assistant called an Itza.

At first, everything was fine, but shit started to get weird pretty quickly. In Thiago and Vera’s condo in Chicago, they started to notice odd sounds at night, floorboards creaking like someone was walking around, cold spots, soft tapping on the walls, that sort of thing. Creepier still, their Itza sometimes randomly played music when no one asked it to, and sometimes seemed to be answering the questions of someone who wasn’t there. It also ordered bizarre stuff of its own volition and had it delivered to their house: a pink dildo, a case of lye, a samurai sword. Thiago and Vera were initially amused, but as time went on, the Itza seemed more and more to have taken on a life of its own.

Now, you might think, because of all the stuff with the Itza, that this is going to go in a sort of “rogue AI” direction, but this is absolutely not that. The crazy stuff happening with the Itza is just a symptom of a much larger problem.

Since the couple started to suspect that the condo was haunted, they decided to try to find the former tenant and ask her if she’d experienced anything paranormal while she lived there. But before they can do that, a freak accident snatches Vera from the world, and Thiago becomes convinced it was engineered by whatever entity is in their condo.

See, they always set the alarm on the Itza so they could wake up for work, but on this one particular day, the alarm failed to go off even though Thiago was sure he set it. Vera overslept and had to rush to get to work; Thiago offered to drive her, but she insisted she’d take the train. At the train station, though, a young man who had just stolen someone’s phone plowed into her as she was hurrying toward the stairs, and she fell full-on to the bottom, splitting her head open on the concrete.

Because the kid who ran into her was an undocumented immigrant, Vera’s death became a rallying cry for various political pundits, even though both Thiago and Vera are also Mexican-American. The very public wrangling over Vera’s death causes Thiago a great deal of added distress, because he feels resentment that all these people who didn’t know her are using her as a prop for their own agendas.

After Vera’s death, Thiago further discovers that the woman who had lived in their condo previously may have done some sort of ritual that summoned something into the world, possibly as a sort of revenge on the landlord who had her evicted.

Tired of dealing with the circus surrounding the accident and the crazy shit going on in the condo, Thiago decides to take the very generous life insurance payout he got from Vera’s death and buy an isolated cabin in the Colorado mountains to get away from it all. On the drive there, he stops at a very creepy diner in the middle of nowhere and gets a free milkshake from the lone man working there, who might have more to do with what’s happening to Thiago than he realizes.

Once he arrives in Colorado, he is almost immediately adopted by a friendly Saint Bernard, who approaches him in a parking lot. He tries to find the dog’s owner, but no one claims him, so Thiago takes the dog home and starts to develop deep affection for the big lug, who he names Wilford Brimley. Be warned, though: some REAL bad shit happens to this dog, so if you’re sensitive to stuff involving animals (as I am; no shame), you might want to brace yourself because it’s pretty fucking upsetting.

The dog actually runs off into the woods one day, and when Thiago goes to find him, he discovers a bizarre stone structure, much like the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey, behind his house. I don’t want to spoil too much about this thing and what exactly it represents, and I’m not entirely sure I know the answer to that question myself anyway, but suffice it to say, that this is where the cosmic horror stuff starts creeping into the narrative, and the story gets stranger and stranger as it goes on. We’re never completely certain how much of what Thiago is experiencing is real, though it does seem that some kind of powerful entity is definitely messing with him on purpose, for reasons which we only barely comprehend.

As I said, this was a great read, not in-your-face scary but more a kind of chilling, disquieting vibe that becomes more and more disturbing as it goes and really lingers in your mind for a while afterward. Although the narrative jumps back and forth in time, and reality increasingly begins to blur around the edges, it’s an extremely compelling story with a very relatable, sympathetic narrator. It’s also one of the most poignant, gut-wrenching examinations of grief I think I’ve ever read, and some of Thiago’s observations concerning his feelings about his wife’s death are as heartbreaking as they are painfully accurate.

If you’re in the mood for a spooky haunting tale that takes a peculiar Lovecraftian turn toward the end, this is an easy recommend, especially if you’re also in the market for something with real emotional heft that makes the horror elements all that much more horrific.

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends.