Good Neighbors by Sarah Langan
Hardcover, 304 pages
Published February 2021 by Atria Books
Check out my podcast interview with the author!
My interview with Sarah Langan on YouTube
Sarah Langan is an author I am overdue to read. She’s received three Bram-Stoker awards. She’s a founding board member of the Shirley Jackson Awards. So I don’t know what took me so long but I am fixing that problem now. I was scrolling the just ordered list on the library app and saw this title. I got it entirely on the strength of the author's reputation and went in as cold as I could. I didn’t read the dustjacket description or the blurbs. This is a case where I think knowing the concept or the ideas will not mess with the expectations. After three hundred pages and a literary experience, it is hard to remember exactly what I was expecting, but I think I was in store for a dark horror mystery.
Good Neighbors is a novel that resists tight genre distinction but if you really want to know it is I would call it a horror social satire. What blows my mind is that I read a few reviews so far and not one seems to notice or comment on the intentional in your face word for word tribute to the classic Twilight Zone episode The Monsters are Due on Maple Street. What is wrong with young people?
I mean I knew as soon the street was named Maple street, and the last act of the book being named The Monsters Arrive on Maple Street.
I suspect there are mico-details throughout this book that I am just missing as I have never been a suburban resident. I mean loving the Descendants song Suburban Home is about as much as I know about life in the suburbs. I have always lived in cities or college towns. None the less we all know the environment to a certain level through cultural osmosis.
“Like, if your life isn’t perfect, you keep your mouth shut and don’t talk about it until it is perfect, and then you brag.”
Maple Street is a microcosm of the suburbs, a long island tract home neighborhood that the author clearly mapped out in details that extend way beyond the narrative. Langan’s neighbors might be nervous looking for shadows of them as they read the book. The various parts of the novel have updated maps with the addresses of everyone on the street and who is left. This tells me that the part of the story we are seeing is the chuck of ice above the surface. I know as much as there are elements of the Maple street story below the water line there are also themes and ideas below the surface.
Give me a book I am thinking about long after I close the book and I tend to like it more and more weeks later. Good Neighbors is one of those books.
The story is a simple one, the lead characters are the Wilde family. Arlo is an ex-rock n’ roller, and his former beauty pageant wife Gertie doesn’t fit in with the other families. This sore thumb status makes them the target of the street’s Queen-bee busy body Rhea Schroeder. The pressure and attention builds like a steam engine on a train pulling out of the station.
That is when the stinkhole happens. I can only guess what I think the giant hole represents, the weather and the natural horrors of the novel are things that happen to regions like Arizona and Florida. The stress of the changing climate when we were young was considered far off. Our parents punted on climate change not realizing that these pressures would one day be a factor in the neighborhood drama.
When Sally Rhea’s daughter disappears in the sinkhole it is not so simple as the events take a surreal, and or supernatural turn. The paranoia and suspicion turn a normal neighborhood game of telephone and rumors into murder.
The narrative is mostly third-person following the relevant characters at all the right times. Much of the details and stunning revelations are done in a fun set of fake articles, reports, and book excerpts that tell us these events were big news nationally as well as the local grapevine.
The rising temperature of the near future and the adjacent stress is the reason Good Neighbors is a sly Cli-Fi novel. The heat and the climate issues simmer early in the novel, if there was a thing, I am critical of is I could have used a little more of this element closer to the forefront of the last 100 pages or so. I am aware that might be my personal bias speaking.
So, let’s talk about that Twilight Zone connection. The Monsters are Due on Maple Street is a Twilight Zone episode I once watched in school. We watched it in an English class and the teacher was talking about fiction as a political allegory. That episode in the small 24-minute TZ was about many of the same themes as this novel. What Langan does in the process of modernizing and expanding the suburban paranoia is pretty impressive. This novel has several deft tactics to make the classic story modern. Readers who don’t know that Twilight Zone episode are missing the most amazing elements of creation in this novel. Langan transfers cold war fears to climate change and the fear of communist or alien invasion to the neighborhood race for status. Much of this happens through a prism of social media and Langan hits with precision.
"Our language is reduced to a series of agreed-upon signs reflecting not nuance, but binaries: like/dislike; good/bad; yes/no. We are even more lonely for the failure of it…”
Good Neighbors has a giant sinkhole that is horrifically described as well as any monster novel but this modern horror addresses mob mentality. Bullies make Tik-tok videos, neighbors pay attention to who liked their stay-cation photos on Insta, and which carefully chosen emojis were used as passive-aggressive Facebook reactions.
The ultimate modern suburban horror novel, the monsters have indeed arrived on Maple Street. Do yourself a favor and read Good Neighbors. This book does for the burbs what American Psycho did for Wall Street assholes and I am here for it’s scares and biting satire.
No comments:
Post a Comment