Good Neighbors

*4.5 stars. Full review to come.

Good Neighbors by Sarah Langan was a chilling vision of contemporary American society. The book was a character focused slow-burn, with echos of Shirley Jackson's The Lottery, contrasting the idealistic image of people of Maple Street (and all suburbia, and America) with the murky and hideous rot within.

I just love Sarah Langan. I've read her for ages and long awaited a new novel. Though this is technically less horror than her usual work, I still loved it.

An ex-rockstar and ex-beauty queen, both from rough backgrounds, move their family from Brooklyn to a Long Island suburb. At first, things are all right. The family have issues, but they really care about each other. The mother becomes friends with a neighbor, a community college professor who tanked her own career with a predilection for violence and heavy delusion.

This takes place in the near future, the very near future, and climate change has made the earth strange. Sinkholes appear across the country, including in the suburb. When the professor neighbor's daughter falls into the sinkhole, the professor goes off the deep end and begins to blame the rockstar husband. By claiming he molested her child.

And everything spirals from there.

I devoured this book. It tackles issues of class, urban vs. suburban, death and mourning, and human interrelations. Which, in this book, are messy. But there is some hope at the end, despite all the terrible things that happen.

Former pageant-queen Gertie Wilde moved her family to Long Island for a fresh start and thought she had found that on idyllic Maple Street. Her family may not fit in perfectly (her husband is a former rockstar and has been to rehab; her kids are Brooklyn tough and socially awkward), but things are looking up when she befriends Rhea, the Queen Bee of the block. However, after a misunderstanding, Rhea drops Gertie from her life and the rest of the neighborhood follows suit. And when Rhea's daughter falls victim to an unfortunate sinkhole accident, Rhea will stop at nothing to lay blame on the entire Wilde family.

This novel about the everyday horrors of suburbia and how rumors can quickly spiral out of control is tense and compulsively readable. The flawed, complex characters who make up the main cast are not always sympathetic, and their actions are often uncomfortable to read. Still, the framing narrative of interviews and news articles that refer to the “Maple Street Murders” will surely keep readers hooked until the dramatic conclusion; it certainly had me intrigued enough to keep the pages turning even when I was cringing at what I was reading. Not everything worked for me: the “Next Sunday, A.D.” of the plot setting felt unnecessary, and if I never see the word “bitumen” again it will be too soon, but the rest of it was strong enough for me to ignore those issues. 3.5 sinkholes out of 5, bumped up because the Rat Pack exploring the sinkhole for Shelly's body was so creepy and so, so good .