Here's another extreme horror novel that boasts a well defined and highly topical story. And yes, it's about what you think it's about, given that title. If you're not going to be able to read graphic accounts of child abuse and murder, then this isn't just not for you, it's emphatically not for you. I would recommend that you stop reading right now and move on to a different review. Jon Athan was very aware of what he was writing and there's actually a lot less of the extreme stuff than we might expect. He even cut some because it didn't move the story along. However, what there is is not for the faint hearted.

Cleverly, he eases us into it, one reason why this is called 'The Groomer' not 'The Paedophile'. In chapter one, ten year old Liam Hansen plays Minecraft and Fortnite and idly chats with his online buddy Cheese2002. They play most days so they're good friends. Cheese even has Minecraft coins and Fortnite skins for him, which he wants to give him in person, so they meet in Plaza Park to do the handover. And then Zachary Denton, who's a little older than Liam thought Cheese would be, tells him that he can jailbreak his Switch so he can play a bunch of games for free, but he has to do it at his house and, well, that's the last Liam's parents see of him.

Chapter two is even more clever, because Zachary is seen talking to five year old Grace McCarthy by a park fountain by her eight year old brother, who tells their dad, who confronts him and tries to steal his camera to look at the photos he took. However, he knows his rights, knows that he did nothing illegal and knows that the cop who breaks up their scuffle will inevitably side with him. He even has a slick website to back up that he's a professional photographer taking portfolio pictures in a public place. In fact, it's Andrew McCarthy (no, not that one) who technically broke the law by taking his property without consent.

It's chapter three when things get brutal. A grotesquely obese man, five seven but three hundred pounds, partly in response to anti-androgen medication he was prescribed after his first offence, has both Liam and an eighteen month old toddler who was snatched from a Walmart parking lot. While the former pleads and the latter screams, he tortures them both. Liam's used as a human dartboard, then drenched in lemonade, and the toddler's limbs and head are crushed in a vice. It isn't remotely pretty and it's all captured on film. He makes what he calls hurtcore. Snuff films, of course, but with an added layer of cruelty. He's over the moon when the toddler shouts "No". It's great cinema.

And so we go. There are other children taken advantage of, most obviously Sydney Fox, a sixteen year old girl tricked into nudes and porn, but she takes her own life when it becomes too much for her to stand. All because mum and dad fight drunk and PhoenixClare21 was sympathetic. Mostly, though, we follow Andrew McCarthy, who's unwilling to sit back and do nothing after his daughter is kidnapped by person or persons unknown as she was getting out of school. He wants Grace back and he'll do anything it takes to find her and bring her back to her family. That's where our story lies, as we find out what "anything" truly means.

The writing is crude but literate, the only real slip being the wrong smart apostrophes, and it gets the point across very capably. These aren't bad kids. They've even learned basic safety rules, like not talking to strangers or accepting gifts from them. However, Zachary Denton is a very capable groomer and he plays on that, befriending them slowly and carefully so they don't think of him as a stranger and making it seem like they're safe when they aren't. He has enough of a forgettable face that he slips easily from people's minds. Of course, McCarthy, after the chapter two incident thinks Zachary must have been responsible for Grace's disappearance, but he can't remember his name.

The best chapter for me was chapter fourteen, because, unlike Zachary, who's frustratingly sharp, Andrew isn't a bright man. He doesn't think things through. He's angry, understandably so, so he lashes out, ineptly. He doesn't have any real leads, so works through the website built to support California's Megan's Law and gets brutal with convicted sex offenders like Diego Cavezas or Adam Woods. They had nothing to do with Grace's disappearance but Andrew  doesn't know that until he asks and he asks very brutally indeed. Eventually, one of them gets him onto the right track.

This is powerful stuff, fundamentally a vigilante story in the vein of 'Death Wish' but with a focus on paedophilia rather than the more generic murder and rape. The book asks the same question: if this happened to your family, how far would you go. Athan's sympathies are clearly with Andrew all the way to the bitter end, even though he realises by that point that he's gone far too far but continues anyway, knowing that there's no way back for him. No, he won't return for four sequels and a remake, but neither will Zachary Denton and neither will Cheese2002.

While the scenes of child manipulation, torture and eventually murder are the ones most likely to send readers to the bathroom to throw up their lunch, the toughest scenes for me were actually far more banal ones. There's one in particular late in the book when Andrew believes he's tracked down Cheese to his home but finds a nice and completely normal older couple instead. They react the way you might expect, fighting back against an armed intruder, and we're likely on their side out of pure instinct until we realise that they know. They didn't do anything themselves but they let it happen. Their son is still their son and they love him, whatever he is, just as much as Grace is Andrew's daughter and he's doing what he's doing because he loves her. That's hard to take.

The more extreme horror I read, the more I realise how important it is to be grounded in story. A few haven't had that and they suffer because of it. They feel like torture porn, there just to gross us out and make us treat it like an endurance challenge. I got through the whole thing! Give me a sticker! However, the ones that build the extreme material on top of solid stories where we care for characters and sympathise with their plights often have more power because they took a step beyond what most writers would be willing to take. This is another of those. Read this in sections, because you'll often need breaks to make sure your kids are where you think they are. ~~ Hal C F Astell