Review: The Scarecrow Man by Miguel Goncalves

The Scarecrow Man by Miguel Goncalves
Dark Pine Publishing (September 2023)
40 pages; $4.75 paperback; $0.00 e-book
Reviewed by Haley Newlin

Do you dare enter the Scarecrow Show? 

From the pages of Devil’s Reject (by Dark Pine Publishing) comes Miguel Goncalves’s short story, “The Scarecrow Man,” where the line between reality and nightmare blurs into a devilish dance of psychological horror and crime fiction. As I devoured this debut, I couldn’t shake the echoes of Robert Bloch’s Psycho and A24’s cinematic masterpiece Pearl. 

Like Norman Bates with his taxidermy and fascination with human skin, “The Scarecrow Man” follows a character with a strange hobby of building scarecrows, which he enters in an annual contest. The psychological depth of “The Scarecrow Man” isn’t case-study-level detail but executed with such sinister realism that I sometimes felt like I was listening to an episode of my favorite true crime podcast, Parcast’s Serial Killers, when reading. Bloch captured this dreadful but brilliant insistence on reality in his landmark novel, Psycho, and to stumble upon it in such a brief piece of horror fiction like “The Scarecrow Man” is astonishing.

The scarecrow man’s ambition becomes more troublesome as the plot unfolds. It was like sitting through Pearl’s audition segment in the second installment of the X trilogy, where she’s so sure of herself, but the judges only see an unhinged young woman. I can hear Mia Goth in her practiced country accent, “I do love a good audience.”

Another standout feature of “The Scarecrow Man” is the haunting black-and-white illustrations. Reminiscent of a noir comic book, these visuals, especially the Jekyll-Hyde-like image of the scarecrow man as man and “monster,” complement the psychological teetering atmosphere of the story but amplify it to a new, wonderfully horrific level.

“The Scarecrow Man” focuses less on the why and more on the what. I do wish there were a few more pages on the process of creating the scarecrows. We get a wickedly satisfying unraveling of where the scarecrow man gets his supplies, which is every bit as deviant and disturbing as a real-life serial killer. Still, the maniacal creation of each piece would’ve added an extra dose of terror.

In “The Scarecrow Man,” Miguel Goncalves seamlessly blends psychological horror and crime fiction, paying homage to classics like “Psycho” while forging new territory in cutting-edge unease. This short story is an unputdownable, unforgettable experience that lingers in the reader’s mind.