A Review of Sarah Langan’s “Good Neighbors”
Good Fences Make Good Neighbors
Horror author Sarah Langan’s new novel, Good Neighbors, is being promoted by her publisher as being just like the work of mid-20th Century author Shirley Jackson. However, Good Neighbors is not a horror novel — at least, not in the conventional sense — and it veers more toward Jackson’s 1948 debut The Road Through the Wall than it does, say, The Haunting of Hill House. While The Road Through the Wall was stuffed with characters that share a neighbourhood street, Good Neighbors is focused more on two families that live on a street in a different neighbourhood and zip code. While Jackson’s book was set in the not-so-distant past of the California town she grew up in, Good Neighbors is set in 2027 Long Island, where the author was raised. So there are similarities and differences between the two works that are quite startling, but if I had to read one of these books again, I would lean toward Good Neighbors and its clipped prose — simply because it is the more entertaining of the two novels.
Good Neighbours is set in a very hot summer where climate change has led the thermometer to break the 100-degree Fahrenheit mark on multiple consecutive days. Told in third-person narration, with clips from fictional books and newspaper articles interjecting, the story centers on the family of Arlo and Gertie Wilde. Arlo is a former rock star and heroin addict, while Gertie is a former beauty pageant queen and abuse victim. Their children are Julie and Larry. Julie is a headstrong young woman, though one who curses like a sailor, who looks after her brother Larry, who may be autistic and has a habit of sticking his hands down his pants whenever he is frightened or nervous. One day, a massive sinkhole opens in the park adjacent to the street the Wildes live on. A young girl falls into that sinkhole. That girl’s mother, Rhea Schroeder, who has dark issues relating to her past haunting her and who has a penchant for being violent to boot, starts a smear campaign amongst the neighbours to blame Arlo for the accident. Things spiral downward from there until another unspeakable tragedy occurs.
As much as Good Neighbors is about the dangers of climate change, it is also about a fractured America — an America on the cusp of a civil war, and an America who voted for Donald Trump in the last election by some 70 million strong. What plays out in this small, upscale middle-class neighbourhood in Long Island in the novel was being played out in real-time during the writing of the book in the rest of America. It will be interesting to see if Good Neighbors will be as relevant upon publication in early February with the inauguration of Joe Biden as president. That’s probably my biggest criticism of the book: it really could have been set in the present day and not the near future. By the time 2027 rolls around, it may be that America will have healed from its fractious nature and will have stepped back from the edge of its moral sinkhole.
I generally enjoyed Good Neighbors, though. It is dark, yet it is funny. It is sometimes immersed in quasi-current pop culture references that are yummy — Disney’s 1979 sci-fi epic The Black Hole gets a lot of ink here — and it is full of three-dimensional characters. Even the unhinged characters are somehow appealing, and, if you take a minor break from reading this book, you might accidentally come to see their side of the story as verbatim truth as you pick up the novel again and try to remember the threads that run through it. The only other thing that is a bit of a knock is that Langan is not much of a world builder. The name of Arlo’s band is named Fred Savage’s Revenge (groan) and all the kids play a game called Deathcraft on their PlayStations. Even the lyrics that Arlo had written are meant to be profound, but border on parody or novelty. This only goes to cheapen the novel and makes one wonder why the author hadn’t set the book in the here and now and used the names of currently popular video games and such. It might have made for a stronger read. In fact, in a move that would resemble the works of Shirley Jackson, one might go a step further and wonder if the book might have been more believable in its setting if Langan had forgone mentioning any signifiers that would give away the year the book takes place in. After all, in all of Jackson’s writing, there are no televisions or radios or even movie theatres. She was smart. Her work hasn’t dated as much as Langan’s probably will at some point soon.
Still, while no book is perfect, I can say that — for all of its warts and blemishes — Good Neighbors is an entertaining read. At the same time, there is fodder to chew on about the state of America and where we might be heading — especially if Trump runs for re-election in the year 2024 (and wins). It’s not a pretty sight, but the novel does end, for one family at least, on a sort of upbeat note. Canada also gets kudos in the text, so any novel that more or less names Canada as the best country in the world is going to get brownie points from me! All in all, Good Neighbors is an important, vital read that is fun at the same time, and part of the fun, of course, is getting to see how much it compares to a work now roughly 70 years old. The Road Through the Wall has gotten an update it seems, and you can read all about it right here in Good Neighbors.
Sarah Langan’s Good Neighbors will be published by Atria Books / Simon & Schuster Canada on February 2, 2021.
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Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
